The Math Education Blog
A recent post on an NCTM discussion group asked about tools to help students visualize and understand addition and subtraction of integers. We wanted to make a visualization tool for students that they could use in multiple ways. The result is the Web Sketchpad model below (and here). Page one focuses on addition while page...
Arrays can be enormously helpful tools for helping young learners to visualize multiplication. Early work with arrays also sets the stage for more advanced mathematics, like binomial multiplication. In this blog post, I present several interactive arrays built with Web Sketchpad as part of the Dynamic Number project. The interactive array model below (and here) consists...
The picture below on the left shows a right triangle JML with altitude KM. This altitude is defined as the geometric mean of JK and KL. Using similar triangles, you can prove that JK × KL = KM². Another way to think about this construction is shown below on the right. Start with segments JK and...
Twitter is a great place to find geometry problems. The July 22, 2017 post of xylem presented the image below with two squares, ABCD and BFGE, sharing a vertex. Given that AE = 5, what is the length of DG? My first thought was that surely the problem was underspecified. Without knowing more about the...
Estimation is an important mathematical skill, yet we rarely ask students to make estimates that relate to fractions. As part of the Dynamic Number project, we created a “mystery” fraction challenge that presents a green point somewhere between 0 and 1 on the number line. The point’s location can be represented as a fraction with numerator between...
I was delighted that Daniel recently posted our Binomial Multiplication sketches in Web Sketchpad format. I thought about those sketches when I noticed a fairly new myNCTM thread on “When and How do we phase out the body in math education?”
The four Web Sketchpad activities below from our Dynamic Number project provide a sequenced collection of challenges and games that develop an area model approach to binomial multiplication and factoring. You can click any of the images to open the interactive websketches on a separate page. Dynamic Algebra Tiles, Part One In the first websketch,...
I’ve lost track of how many parents have quizzed me as to why the mathematics their children are learning is so different from what they remember in school. “Why must my kids study more than one way to multiply? Isn’t memorizing their multiplication facts enough?” is a frequent lament. James Tanton, Mathematician in Residence at the...
In my previous post, I wrote about cross number puzzles—puzzles that mix arithmetic and logic to introduce students to place value, commutativity, and the addition and subtraction algorithms. Now, I’d like to present a variant of cross number puzzles that adds some algebra to the mix. Below (and here on its own page) are a...
We live in a golden age of number puzzles. Sudoku is probably the most famous of all modern-day number puzzles, but there are many Japanese puzzles that are also gaining popularity, such as KenKen and Menseki Meiro. In this post, I’d like to introduce a number puzzle for young learners that predates these challenges by 40...