One of my favorite challenge activities with students is to ask them if they are older than one million days (hours, minutes, seconds). If so, they work out their age in each of the possible units. They are highly motived with these seemingly simple questions and begin immediately (using a calculator) to find the answers. […]
READ MOREGreedy Algorithims
The word ‘algorithm’ is well known today. It is over 1,000 years old and comes from the name of a middle eastern mathematician who devised many step-by-step procedures for working with numbers. Today there are all types of algorithms and, to promote thinking, we should encourage students to devise their own methods. During a recent […]
READ MOREMaryam Mirzakhani: Geometer par-excellence
This is the third and last post in a series on important women mathematicians in history. Click here to view the first post on Ada Lovelace who is often described as the first computer programmer. There are a number of reasons to include the late Iranian scholar Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) as the final entry in […]
READ MOREHypatia of Alexandria: Last but not Least
This is the second post in a series on important women mathematicians in history. Click here to view the first post on Ada Lovelace who is often described as the first computer programmer. Hypatia’s contributions involved several fields of mathematics including advanced geometry, computation methods, and applications to astronomy. Let me begin with a coin […]
READ MOREAda Lovelace: Creative Calculations
This is the first post in a series on important women mathematicians in history. Click here to view the second post on Hypatia of Alexandria who is described as being the first person to document mathematics. In the history of machine computing there are only two computer languages named after people. Those two are Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Ada Lovelace (1815–1852). Both […]
READ MOREFocus on Fractions: Linking Fractions and Decimals (Using the Number Line)
This is part of a series on fractions: Part 1: History of Fractions and Fraction Concepts Part 2: Fractions Facts Part 3: Fraction models and visuals Part 4: this post – decimal fractions and the number line Decimal fractions used in history and the use of the number line in teaching fractions. In this post, […]
READ MOREForgetting: the Challenge of Teaching Mathematics
Mathematics is a discipline of interconnected knowledge that is built on prior learning. Students are being asked to recall concepts, skills and procedures in order to successfully learn new material. Learning new content is next to impossible if pre-requisites have been forgotten. This makes the study of forgetting crucial. The initial, and still relevant, scientific studies […]
READ MOREComputational Thinking: Decomposing Situations
The aim of computational thinking (CT) is to help students write “good” code for an algorithm that can be used to complete a routine sequence of steps. The discussion here will focus on decomposing situations, one of the components of CT that were identified in my previous post. The term algorithm is usually familiar to […]
READ MOREComputational Thinking: What, Why, When
Computational thinking is a term that has received a tremendous amount of interest in the last few years. At the moment, the emphasis on computational thinking in schools is somewhat sporadic. Competitions, conferences, professional learning activities, funding, and research are much more evident in Asia and Europe than other parts of the world. At a […]
READ MOREFocus on Fractions: A Visual Model to Teach Multiplication and Division of Fractions
Employing Computational Thinking when teaching multiplication and division of fractions. There are a few statements from elementary school mathematics that seem to be universally imprinted in the minds of adults. Two of these relate to multiplying and dividing fractions. For multiplication, adults usually recall the rule, “Multiply the top numbers and multiply the bottom numbers.” […]
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