Math Links

A study on the efficacy of introducing game-like achievements in classroom learning, with math as one of the examples, see appendices

Forthcoming June 2012: "From the pyramids and the Parthenon to the Sydney Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim, this book takes readers on an eye-opening tour of the mathematics behind some of the world's most spectacular buildings. Beautifully illustrated, the book explores the milestones in elementary mathematics that enliven the understanding of these buildings and combines this with an in-depth look at their aesthetics, history, and structure."

"Despite what we may sometimes imagine, popular mathematics writing didn't begin with Martin Gardner. In fact, it has a rich tradition stretching back hundreds of years. This entertaining and enlightening anthology--the first of its kind--gathers nearly one hundred fascinating selections from the past 500 years of popular math writing, bringing to life a little-known side of math history."

Mathematical models of cosmology reconsidered

Abstract:"Prime Climb is an educational game that provides individual support for learning number factorization skills in the form of hints based on a model of student learning. Previous studies with Prime Climb indicated that students may not always be paying attention to the hints, even when they are justified (i.e. based on a student model's assessment). In this thesis we will discuss the test-bed game, Prime Climb, and our re-implementation of the game which allowed us to modify the game dynamically and will allow for more rapid prototyping in the future. To assist students as they play the game, Prime Climb includes a pedagogical agent which provides individualized support by providing user-adaptive hints. We then move into our work with the eye-tracker to better understand if and how students process the agent's personalized hints. We will conclude with a user study in which we use eyetracking data to capture user attention patterns as impacted by factors related to existing user knowledge, hint types, and attitude towards getting help in general. We plan to leverage these results in the future to make hint delivery more effective."

"In December, 2011, Ian Waitz, MIT's Dean of Engineering, launched the MIT-K12 project, driven by a series of questions: How can we change the perception of the role of engineers and scientists in the world? What can MIT do, right now, to improve STEM education at the K12 level? What if MIT became a publicly accessible "experiential partner" to the country's K12 educators? What if MIT students generated short-form videos to complement the work those educators are already doing in their classrooms and homes?"

Tim Gowers analyzes Elsevier Publishing's announcement to the mathematics community on reduced article charges and other concessions in light of recent university, funding body and government initiatives in support of more open scholarly publishing.

Current reforms in mathematics education emphasise the need for pedagogy because it offers learners opportunities to develop their proficiency with complex high-level cognitive processes. One has always associated the ability to make mathematical connections, together with the teacher's role in teaching them, with deep mathematical understanding. This article examines the nature and quality of the mathematical connections that the teachers' representations of those connections enabled or constrained. The researchers made video recordings of four Grade 11 teachers as they taught a series of five lessons on algebra-related topics. The results showed that the teachers' representations of mathematical connections were either faulty or superficial in most cases. It compromised the learners' opportunities for making meaningful mathematical connections. The researchers concluded by suggesting that helping teachers to build their representation repertoires could increase the effectiveness of their instructional practices.

"As a medium for learning, digital games provide promising possibilities to motivate and engage students in subject learning. In this study, a game-based learning system, My-Pet- My-Quest, is developed to support pupils' math learning. This is due to the fact that most students in Taiwan have relatively lower positive attitude towards math learning, even though their math performance is prominent. To this end, a three-tire framework is proposed to guide the design of the My-Pet-My-Quest system. A quasi-experiment was conducted to examine the influence of game quests on pupils' enjoyment and goalpursuing in math learning. The results revealed that game quests were favored by students in terms of enjoyment, goal orientation, and goal intensity. Possible reasons for these results and a discussion of related issues are presented in this paper."

"The first webinar is July 17, 2012 at 3pm eastern/12noon pacific and will focus on creating accessible math images, giving participants a clear understanding of the end-to-end process of converting conventional math display into digital formats that can be accessed by students with print disabilities. Special attention will be given to the tools being created by the OSEP-funded DIAGRAM Center to facilitate image description. "

"In this paper, we will describe work that we have done in this direction using as a test-bed an edu-game for number factorization, Prime Climb. This game includes a pedagogical agent that provides adaptive interventions during game playing based on a model of student learning [13, 18]. Here we focus on how we re-implemented the original Prime Climb game into a framework that enables rapid prototyping and testing of different design hypothesis. We also discuss preliminary work on using eye tracking data on user attention patterns to better understand if and how students process the agent‟s adaptive interventions." (from the introduction)

Abstract: "This research seeks to look into the design process that promotes the development of an educational computer game that supports teaching and learning processes. The research specifically looks at the design of an educational computer game for teaching and learning of the topic of functions. The topic is essential in the teaching and learning of Mathematics courses such as Discrete Mathematics, Real Analysis and Calculus among others at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Kenya. The computer game was developed using the Basic Unified process (BUP) which is a streamlined version of the rational unified process (RUP). This is an object oriented methodology mostly used for small projects with few end users. Due to the few numbers of end users we used interview method of data collection to gather requirements for the computer game. A paper prototype was used to validate the requirements. Use cases were used for both analysis and design of the game while Class diagrams and activity diagrams were purely used for the design of the game. Owens' six top level design anatomy aided in the design of the computer game. The overall computer game design was based on Crawfords' computer game design sequence model. The well designed and developed game met all its user requirements and was able to facilitate the teaching and learning of functions to Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science students who were taking Discrete mathematics in their first year of study at JKUATs' Taita/Taveta campus. Development of heuristics for measuring interest, fun and motivation are recommendations given to aid in the evaluation of user satisfaction of educational computer games."

Published by University of Chicago Press, July 2012. "Math and science hold powerful places in contemporary society, setting the foundations for entry into some of the most robust and highest-paying industries. However, effective math and science education is not equally available to all students, with some of the poorest students-those who would benefit most-going egregiously underserved. This ongoing problem with education highlights one of the core causes of the widening class gap. While this educational inequality can be attributed to a number of economic and political causes, in Empowering Science and Mathematics Education in Urban Communities, Angela Calabrese Barton and Edna Tan demonstrate that it is augmented by a consistent failure to integrate student history, culture, and social needs into the core curriculum. They argue that teachers and schools should create hybrid third spaces-neither classroom nor home-in which underserved students can merge their personal worlds with those of math and science. A host of examples buttress this argument: schools where these spaces have been instituted now provide students not only an immediate motivation to engage the subjects most critical to their future livelihoods but also the broader math and science literacy necessary for robust societal engagement. A unique look at a frustratingly understudied subject, Empowering Science and Mathematics Education pushes beyond the idea of teaching for social justice and into larger questions of how and why students participate in math and science. " Excerpts in Google Books

Text from an interview with John H. Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge, discussing history of cultural understanding of infinity, as well as different understandings of infinity - mathematical, physical, cosmological

Mathematics in Popular Culture Essays on Appearances in Film, Fiction, Games, Television and Other Media Edited by Jessica K. Sklar and Elizabeth S. Sklar Foreword by Keith Devlin Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-4978-1 Ebook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8994-7 25 photos, appendices, notes, bibliographies, index 353pp. 2012

Math "Hackathon"

MathMovesU is an innovative program sponsored by Raytheon designed to engage middle-school students with math. MathMovesU.com features content that appeals to things they are most passionate about, such as sports, music, and fashion, while delivering math subject matter in engaging ways, like games, polls, and fun math facts. Play math games, win prizes, and more!

KidsNumbers.com is the absolutely free math resource designed by teachers, specifically for students and children of all ages. A place where students can practice all aspects of math, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in a fun and pressure free way.