Math Links

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.

"Using dynamic slider controls, one can see the real connection between a mathematical function and its plot."

implications for using games for learning

A publisher of academic and scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences, including African Studies, American History, American Literature, Anthropology/Archaeology, Art History, Asian Studies, Biblical Studies, Catholicism, Classics, Communications, Criminology, Drama, East European/Slavic Studies, Eastern Religion, Economic Development, Economics, Education, Ethics, European History, Foreign Languages, Gender/Women's Studies, Geography/Environment, Higher Education, Hispanic/Latin American Studies, International Studies, Judaic Studies, Labor Studies, Legal Studies, Linguistics, Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, Military Studies, Minorities in Education, Minorities in Politics, Minority Studies, Organizations and Leadership, Peace/Conflict Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Public Health, Religious Studies, Research in Education/Social Sciences, Sociology, Urban Studies, US Public Policy, World History

"The Middle School Stream aims to motivate and engage middle school students (grades 5 through 8) in STEM learning, 21st Century Literacy Skills and Systems Thinking by challenging them to design original video games. The High School Stream aims to motivate and engage high school students (grades 9 through 12) in STEM learning, 21st Century Literacy Skills and Systems Thinking by challenging them to design original video games. The Collegiate Stream challenges emerging game developers at the graduate and undergraduate levels to design video games for children (grades pre-K through 8) that teach key STEM concepts and foster an interest in STEM subject areas. The Educator Stream challenges educators to design video games for children (grades pre-K through 12) that teach key STEM concepts and foster an interest in STEM subject areas."

Exploration of a Fermat conjecture on prime numbers

Using games to illustrate concepts in statistics

The survey involved more than 600 "randomly selected mathematicians worldwide" and revealed that many mathematicians publish on arxiv.org, some on their personal websites, some publish in open access journals but disapprove of publishing fees, tenure and promotion influence publication, high awareness of publishing rights, little use of online collaboration tools

Survey of federal STEM education programs

"The virtual school videos for South African learners in the category "maths". The fun way to learn maths! Make sure to have a look at the entire list from top to bottom! "

Discusses inferior textbook publishing practices and offers advice for evaluation of materials by parents

"There may be a reason you can't figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter's math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you're trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution." Lack of quality control in text publishing described and evaluation suggestions for parents offered.

University of Delaware researchers find: "Even [when their children are] as young as 22 months, American parents draw boys' attention to numerical concepts far more often than girls'. Indeed, parents speak to boys about number concepts twice as often as they do girls. For cardinal-numbers speech, in which a number is attached to an obvious noun reference - "Here are five raisins" or "Look at those two beds" - the difference was even larger. Mothers were three times more likely to use such formulations while talking to boys."

Kristine Fowler, mathematics librarian at the University of Minnesota, shares results from a survey of mathematicians concerning how they want to be able to reuse their work, discusses alternatives to standard copyright contracts and urges scholars and institutions to be aware of not only their options but the rights they may cede in entering into publishing agreements.

Motivation and Disposition: Pathways to Learning Mathematics - 73rd Yearbook (2011) Product Description Daniel J. Brahier, Volume Editor and William R. Speer, General Editor "Teaching mathematics is a much broader endeavor than simply helping students to acquire skills and problem-solving strategies. ...NCTM's seventy-third yearbook examines such elements as the demographic composition of a school; the role of movies, television, and the Internet; and nontraditional pedagogy as means of promoting and influencing positive student and teacher dispositions." Of particular interest is Chapter 9 "What Motivates Mathematically Talented Young Women?," which evidently reports on high school girls at a summer camp. Available for .pdf download via purchase, or in a library: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/715171259

"This book provides insights into how mathematical understanding emerged for primary-aged children (5-13 years) when they investigated mathematical tasks through digital media."

Essays and commentaries (full text access requires subscription)

Abstract: "In traditional mathematics education, students have typically been asked to solve lots of tedious and uninteresting exercises for developing the arithmetic skills of addition and subtraction. The paper provides an account of learning arithmetic skills in a more interesting way through the collaborative playing of a puzzle game. 83 students in three classes in Grade 4 were asked to solve arithmetic problems with three different methods: via playing an adapted "cross number puzzle" game on Group Scribbles (GS) collaboratively, via playing the same game on GS individually, and via the traditional method of teaching and learning, i.e. with no games at all. Analysis of the pre and post learning achievement data reveals that the two classes who played the game performed better than the control class, with the collaborative class students achieving better than the individual class students. By playing the game, low-ability students, in particular, made the most significant progress in arithmetic capability and in building up their confidence in doing arithmetic calculations."

A description of mathematicians' and other scientists recent boycott of Elsevier publishing for its high prices and practices to hinder open distribution of scientific knowledge, as well as a comparison of scholarly mathematics journals pricing among major publishers, and introduction to an ongoing movement of mathematicians organized to fix a "broken" scholarly publishing system

by Penta, Michael K., M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL, 2011, 83 pages; 1507796 Abstract record for a thesis completed in December 2011, fulltext requires subscription or purchase. A news story on the departmental blog http://blog.uml.edu/cs/2011/12/penta_ms_video_games_for_math_learning.html describes the kinds of games involved, the participants and the results.