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Six math projects that integrate real-world math problems are presented as a teaching strategy for helping students develop a greater understanding of math.

Movie box office data that is current and very comprehensive. Several different trends are easy to track including exponential, and log functions. Great for using with students to create regression models, making predictions based on the models, checking the results and re-analyzing. Also, when a movie doesn't follow the predictions there are often easy to understand reasons for why the movies behave differently (a holiday weekend may cause the movie to gross more on a given weekend than predicted, etc.)

In brief, it contrasts the modern understanding of causality (and the mathematics this presupposes) with the more recent, perhaps in a sense "postmodern" understanding of causality (again with a concomitant mathematical model) and on the basis of this distinction, draws some interesting parallels between economics and natural events.

Does Understanding the Equal sign Matter? Examines several of the important concepts in algebra focusing on the concept of equality

Our activities during Mathematics Week focus attention on Mathematics and Mathematics Education with the aim of making Mathematics more interesting, attractive, relevant, challenging, rewarding and engaging to learners and the community at large, e.g. by highlighting the impact of Mathematics on our daily lives and stressing the importance of Mathematics as a foundation for careers in science, technology and managerial jobs. Mathematics Week is a vehicle to popularise Mathematics and to increase public awareness, understanding and appreciation of Mathematics.

Who created mathematics? Where did it begin? To answer these questions, we need to think about what mathematics is. In their work on ethnomathematics, Borba (1990) and D'Ambrosio (1990) define the compnonents of ethnomathematics as the follows: ethnos - within a cultural environment mathema - explaining and understanding in order to transcend, managing and coping with reality in order to survive and thrive. tics - techniques such as counting, ordering, sorting, measuring, weighing, ciphering, classifying, ordering, inferring and modeling.

3 levels to help students understand decimals

Pattern blocks are great tools for developing conceptual understanding. I hope to continue to see them used in classrooms, but the virtual kind can allow students to share their thinking with other students virtually. I like using screen capture, cut/paste, upload to a wiki, comment on characteristics/size/description of '1'/and sharing with students so that their thikning can be revisited from multiple venues (home, classroom, internet-broader audience).

Free math tutorials and problems to help you explore and gain deep understanding of math, calculus, trigonometry and geometry topics.

Microsoft Mathematics 4.0, for students in middle school, high school, and early college, shows how to solve equations while bolstering understanding of fundamental math concepts. It features built-in Ink Handwriting Support, which lets you hand-write math problems and equations in a worksheet area on a tablet or ultra-mobile PCs for immediate solving or later work. The software also includes a graphing calculator capable of plotting in 2D and 3D, a movie editor, a library of formulas and equations, a triangle solver, and more.

"Calls are frequently heard for improving schooling by closing the gap between children's life out-of-school and traditional learning styles, and by broadening the space and span for life-long learning opportunities. The Math4Mobile development endeavors to engage all students with mathematical ideas. It provides a collection of tools that could be included in a variety of activities to support students' mathematical skills, conceptual understanding, and creative mathematical thinking. "

"Understanding Probability is a unique and stimulating approach to a first course in probability. The first part of the book demystifies probability and uses many wonderful probability applications from everyday life to help the reader develop a feel for probabilities. The second part, covering a wide range of topics, teaches clearly and simply the basics of probability. ... The first part of the book, with its easy-going style, can be read by anybody with a reasonable background in high school mathematics. The second part of the book requires a basic course in calculus."

"Educational and developmental psychologists have tried to understand how skills and motivation are linked to academic achievement. While research supports ties between individuals' concepts of their abilities and their achievement, we lack a complete picture of how these relations develop from childhood to adolescence. A new longitudinal study looked at how youths' self-concepts are linked to their actual academic achievement in maths and reading from middle childhood to adolescence. The study found that students' self-concepts of their abilities in these two academic domains play an important role in motivating their achievements over time and across levels of achievement."

"Usually, being able to visualise mathematical concepts to students is an important step in helping them understand techniques to illustrate connections with previous learning, helping them master maths notions to progress their skills. The importance of visualising concepts is clearly integral for Peter Mattock who has collected together a valued resource of mathematical activities that can be used with manipulative across the age and ability range."

A college institutional researcher reveals some data concerning math placement tests and the pressures impacting students to opt for more difficult math courses without adequate preparation and unsatisfactory results. He writes: "In my mind, this disconnect exemplifies the degree to which incoming students and families don't grasp the difference between going to college to acquire content knowledge and going to college to develop skills and dispositions. ... [I]f students understand that college is about developing skills and dispositions, I think that they might be more likely to appreciate the chance to start at the beginning that is appropriate for them, savoring each experience like a slow cooked, seven course meal because they know that the culmination of college is made exponentially better by the particular ordering and integrating of the flavors that have come before."

from the abstract: "Mathematics is now at a remarkable in exion point, with new technology radically extending the power and limits of individuals. Crowd- sourcing pulls together diverse experts to solve problems; symbolic computation tackles huge routine calculations; and computers check proofs too long and complicated for humans to comprehend. The Study of Mathematical Practice is an emerging interdisciplinary eld which draws on philoso- phy and social science to understand how mathematics is produced. Online mathematical activity provides a novel and rich source of data for empirical investigation of mathematical practice - for example the community question-answering system mathover ow contains around 40,000 mathe- matical conversations, and polymath collaborations provide transcripts of the process of discovering proofs. Our preliminary investigations have demonstrated the importance of \soft" aspects such as analogy and creativity, alongside deduction and proof, in the production of mathematics, and have given us new ways to think about the roles of people and machines in creating new mathematical knowledge. We discuss further investigation of these resources and what it might reveal. Crowdsourced mathematical activity is an example of a \social machine", a new paradigm, identi- ed by Berners-Lee, for viewing a combination of people and computers as a single problem-solving entity, and the subject of major international research endeavours. We outline a future research agenda for mathematics social machines, a combination of people, computers, and mathematical archives to create and apply mathematics, with the potential to change the way people do mathe- matics, and to transform the reach, pace, and impact of mathematics research."

From the abstract: "this study investigated how the perspectives of the non-computer science educators changed after learning game-programming and how it could be fitted into the K-12 curriculum. Fourteen non-computer science educators and/or administrators in the K - 16 educational systems who made up a cohort at Sam Houston State University, Master of Education/Instructional Technology Program participated in this study. The participants were required to learn two free Web 2.0 game-programming applications and reflect on an article related to reviving interest in math and science as part of their program. Qualitative data consisted of online reflections, and peer-review processes through Facebook. A quantitative component was added to the analysis. The findings indicated that: (a) the perspectives of the participants changed from negative to positive as they reflected on their own game-programming learning experiences; (b) participants came to understand how game programming could build up students' logical concepts and critical thinking skills improving performances in math, science, and other subjects; and (c) due to the benefits of logical concepts and critical thinking skills game programming could have immense benefits if built into the K-12 curriculum."

Abstract: "The purpose of this study is to propose a design principle and framework of educational control (in particular, method for collaborative learning support) that induces and activates interaction between learners intentionally to create a learning opportunity that is based on the knowledge understanding model of each learner. In this paper, we explain the design philosophy and the framework of our game-based learning environment (GBLE) called "Who becomes the king in the country of mathematics?". In addition, we describe the method of collaborative learning support control that incorporates a "learner support agent" to support each learner and a "game control agent" to control the game into the learning environment."

Video featuring Abby Brown, Math Teacher, Torrey Pines High School : ""Mathematica has changed how I think about teaching and how my students learn mathematics. The conversations in our classes focus so much more on concepts and ideas and understanding the mathematics rather than how do I solve the problem."

Definition of the exponential form. A basic example to understand the system of expressing any number into exponential form on the basis of another number.