What If Spreadsheet Math

Spanglish is one of those movies that grows on you. A coming to America story filled with themes that move us: a dedicated and resourceful… Read more

As I was again reading the Common Core Standards, I was struck by their introduction of variables in grade 6. Jim, I could not help… Read more

If a mathematician were asked what these two numbers had in common, she might wonder if they were both primes. They are not. A gambler… Read more

G.H. Hardy, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century wrote this: A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.… Read more

I feel most fortunate when I have a year I get to work on a new great idea in it. This past year has thus… Read more

When I was a kid, Sundays in the summer were car washing days. The stores were closed. The roads were generally quiet. And we took… Read more

As I watched a young woman the other day learning to ride her bike, zigzagging down the street, desperately trying to keep her balance, I… Read more

If you are a Bostonian by address, birth, or just a connection, you can’t help but be full of pride this morning for your baseball… Read more

This picture made the front page of the New York Times this morning. It is not very often that a science experiment makes the headlines… Read more

I like to hang out in the Harvard Graduate School of Education library. It has a good vibe, is usually full of students focused on… Read more

One of the four C’s, perhaps for many the most important 21st century skill, is considered in our schools, cheating. Students caught talking to each… Read more

The words curious and curiosity do not appear in the Mathematics Common Core Standards document, yet they are arguably the most important words in mathematics… Read more

Teaching done right has always been a hard job, but it is now substantially harder. Talk to any teacher and they will tell you that… Read more

I do not know who, when, or where this iconic mathematical representation was developed. It is, however, one of the most powerful and ubiquitous of… Read more

We call our problem solving process, functional thinking. When we apply functional thinking to problem solving in the digital age, we find that a few… Read more

It caught my eye, this headline/story posted on EdWeek recently. Seems there was a panel at a conference that was supposed to debate what they… Read more

We are in a time of dramatic, some would say, revolutionary change in education, “challenging” as Sir Ken Robinson says, “what we take for granted.” His… Read more

As mathematics takes an increasing role in work and life, creativity must become central to its learning, because: 1) creativity and creative problem solving are… Read more

My fortune cookie today read, “If you’re happy, you’re successful.” Usually for me that is true, but not today. For during that same lunch my… Read more

The word seems so benign. Yet it has become the goto word in education. School superintendents, even the best and most advanced of them, use… Read more

Math is not only the last letter in STEM or STEAM, it is the only one that we do not picture as experimental. We don’t… Read more

I still feel it months later, the thrill and awe I knew from finding an answer to a question I have long been troubled by.… Read more

I just looked at a wonderful short video by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity at https://youtu.be/63NTB7oObtw in which he describes creativity as a process that… Read more

Over the Rainbow by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg is considered the greatest song of the century and the greatest song in a movie… Read more

Envisioning technology that reinvents our schools not automates them should, I believe, be our goal and our dream for personalizing learning. Read more

Math Blaster was the biggest hit educational product in the 1980’s, the first decade of the personal computer age. Flying saucer like objects would vaporize… Read more

Cape Cod in the winter is one of those marvelous places filled with interesting shops and people waiting in the quiet winter time for the… Read more

The Genius Behind Accounting Shortcut? It Wasn’t Einstein The Rule of 72 is a nifty shortcut for estimating investment returns; first published mention was in… Read more

Small changes, seemingly inconsequential acts, can have momentous repercussions. Dead birds set off the environmental movement. An assassin’s bullet protesting an exhausted empire started a… Read more

A little over 20 years ago the Harvard Calculus Consortium sought to remake the calculus curriculum. “We believe that the calculus curriculum needs to be… Read more

The key to the digital age is also the key to learning algebra. Despite what many of us may believe, our digital age did not… Read more

One hundred years ago my father at age 9 entered America. He had traveled from his birthplace in a town in what is now Ukraine… Read more

On this 10th anniversary of the iPhone it is worth remembering that this invention, as world-changing as it was, will not be deemed the most… Read more

This picture was first published in 1638! It is from Galileo’s great work Two New Sciences, that he smuggled out of his home imprisonment in… Read more

This program started my career in digital learning. I bought my first computer, an Apple II in February 1978 on their first anniversary. I talked… Read more

What is the hardest question a teacher has to answer? As teachers, especially math teachers, we face this most painful question all too often, rarely… Read more

Or how to build an atomic bomb. One of the best curriculum ideas I ever had was to use this book as the text for… Read more

What if I could give you a magic wand to wave over our educational system and make it fulfill our dreams for our children? What… Read more

When MOOCs were the rage in higher education, I asked my friend David Kaiser, a physicist and professor of the history of science at MIT,… Read more

This graph appeared on one of my favorite websites – Statista. Given the “breaking news” of the day, that the President wants to impose new… Read more

The Parker Solar Probe was launched yesterday to study the sun. Sixty years ago, Eugene Parker launched my scientific career. A young physics research scientist… Read more

Today, I attended an ancient ceremony. It is called “Hooding”. An elaborate and beautiful hood is given to students who have completed their scholarship and… Read more

Three years ago I read a wonderful book by Keith Devlin called The Man of Numbers. It told the story of Leonardo of Pisa who was… Read more

Each summer, as schools get ready for a new school year, the question returns, “Should we be teaching algebra to our children?” it seems to… Read more

Over the past year, we have been working to combine our spreadsheet math lessons (downloaded more than 20,000 times) into digital age problem solving Courses… Read more