Inspired by the work of Magdeline Lampert, interactive problems offer educators a fun tool to help learners think about "mathematical principles" within the familiar context of coinage. We love her idea that playing with combinations and recombinations of denominations promotes engagement with multiplicative thinking, and have produced this as a result.
I'm always inspired when I hear stories about parents who have (and are) supporting their out of the box thinkers in out of the box ways. It gives me a little more courage to do the same for my kids.
What Works? Research Into Practice
The research summaries in this collection highlight promising teaching practice at the classroom level. Produced by a partnership between the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat and the Ontario Association of Deans of Education, the articles are written by scholars at Ontario universities who are experts in the field of education.
The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.
"Why Learn It (WLI) aims to address the issue of motivation around learning math by helping students
explore the beauty and relevance of what they would otherwise dismiss as inconsequential in school.
Targeting late middle-school and early high-school students, WLI takes a hybrid approach to cultivat-
ing motivation. It leverages the engagement value of short (approximately three-minute long) videos
depicting real people talking about how math and computational thinking are critical to their successes
in a number of professional areas. Students then complete a series of interactive exercises that help
students explore an application area discussed in the video in more detail. These exercises, however,
are not simply drill problems aimed at making students experts in a particular content area. Instead,
they are multi-step assignments that require the students to draw upon both detailed mathematical
knowledge and a big picture view of how this knowledge can be used to draw useful, meaningful
conclusions. The exercises are focused on bridging the worlds of number, images, and sounds in or-
der to help students build intuition around a particular topic. Therefore, while some questions have
objectively correct responses, others require students to gather knowledge they have built through
answering previous questions within the packet to draw new inferences. Hints are provided along the
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way to ensure students receive assistance when necessary. Finally, WLI is housed online and is oered
for free, signifying minimal barriers to usage by educators and students."
On Vi Hart's math concept video creations (graduate of Stony Brook, refers to herself as a mathemusician). She is shown with her balloon icosahedron model
"This model for learning mathematics may be quite different from what teachers experienced themselves in the past where classrooms were less interactive, filled with little activity and conversation. Teachers were generally in control, directing all aspects of what was to be learned; different points of view and approaches seldom brought to the surface new ideas and insights and a high degree of redundancy meant that everybody learned the exact same thing at the exact same time.