My all-time favorite piece of software is Graphing Equations and Green Globs. The program has several components but Green Globs is what stole my heart. Figure 11-7 The game is simple to understand. When you start up the novice game, thirteen globs appear randomly scattered on a coordinate grid. (See figure 11-7.) The student’s goal…
Read moreShort Math Stories with a Surprise Twist
I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying watching exciting reruns of football games from the NFL and College games. Also basketball NBA and College. I grew up in Pittsburgh so I’m still a huge Pirate and Steeler fan. I recently watched the 7th game of the 1971 World Series between the Pirates and Baltimore….
Read moreAn Online Math Activity: Pool Paths
April 1, 2020 With the advent of the Coronavirus and closed schools, NCTM has made available webinars for their upcoming 100 days of professional learning starting today, April 1. I tried to sign up for the opening session this evening but it was already closed out. A thousand teachers were already signed up. Can you…
Read moreThe Shrinking Mississippi River Story
Something that your math teachers may have left out when teaching about graphs is that graphs tell stories. And it’s the stories that make the math more interesting. In lesson 3.6 Mr. Jacobs (1) tells the story of Mark Twain’s prediction about how the length of the shrinking Mississippi River will end up. Read the…
Read moreVideo: Quantum Physics for 7 Year Olds & What Teaching is all About
I’ve always been intrigued with physics ever since I nearly failed it in my freshman year. What was it about physics that I found so difficult? Well fast forward 57 years and I’m now taking this course “Exploring the Universe (ETU): A Non-Mathematical Look at the 20th Century Physics and Cosmology” to find out why…
Read moreProductive Struggle in a Math Classroom
Productive struggle works well when the student is motivated to want to solve a difficult problem. What is Productive Struggle? Productive struggle is the process of effortful learning that develops grit and creative problem solving. When students face problems they don’t immediately know how to solve, we don’t want them to give up. We want…
Read moreNew (Old) Activities for 2020
As some of you may know I’ve been busy revamping (bringing up to date) my collection of favorite technology based math activities that I and my colleagues at CIESE developed over 10 years ago. The latest update is called Estimating Heights which was inspired by Dan Meyer’s talk and his #makeovermonday series. Here is the candidate for a make…
Read moreCIESEmath Activities V2.1
Click here to see the latest collection of activities.
Read moreNote to CLIME Community
As I mentioned in a previous blog, CLIME has retired from being an affiliate of NCTM (June 1, 2019). But that doesn’t mean I’ve retired from working towards my vision of math education. My new blog is http://dmcpress.org and it will continue to inform my vision. See SAMR image below. In some recent posts (here…
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