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 thought of the Wright brothers. They owned a bicycle shop where they made and taught people to ride the then relatively new form of transportation. They, like their students, had …
Over the Rainbow
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 of all time, and it is my very favorite song. I never tire of listening to it. E. Y. ”Yip” Harburg wrote not only all of the lyrics for “The …
Odd Times
How many of the products in a 12 by 12 times table are odd numbers? This is a question we rarely ask in paper-based math classrooms, yet it is an important and a very interesting question. We ask students to explore it, learning to Show and Hide rows and columns in their spreadsheet at the …
Drawing Triangles
Though spreadsheets lets you put geometric shapes on the screen, those shapes are not connected with the cells and cannot be changed by using different values. We wanted to make geometric shapes that we could control and change by changing parameters. This is our first try. You can learn to use linear functions to create …
2016 MTA Summer Conference Aug 1 & 2
Learning Math as a Creative Experience with Spreadsheets UMASS Amherst MTA Summer Conference Guide OUR WORKSHOP: What if your students had the opportunity to learn mathematics in new ways, observe patterns, experience connections between varieties of representations and generate their own solutions to interesting problems? In this 2-session workshop you will have the …