There are really two kinds of mathematics we do every day. I like to call one headmath and the other handmath, one is the mental arithmetic and problem solving we all have to do and the other is the math on paper or more likely today, if you are not a student, on computers. Though …
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 How Schools Kill Creativity, the most watched Ted Talk of all time, shows we hunger for learning as a creative experience. Yet we continue to treat learning math as a …
How many of the numbers from 1 to 100 are in the times table? All, Most, Less than half? I think you will find in this exploration of the relationship between the multiplication table products and the whole numbers as fascinating as I have. It is one of my favorite Labs because it gives us …
This is the graduation exercise for the basic use of spreadsheets. We combine rules and addressing to have students build their own hundreds table in the fewest steps. There are many ways of doing this and students can be as creative and exploratory as they want. Nor should they feel limited to tables that start …
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 obviously thought would be an attention grabbing, contentious, and controversial topic. Their conclusion: NO! All I can say is: “You have got to be kidding!” Now, I know that textbooks …
Take this tour of functional thinking applied to the key concepts of mathematics. Visualize and experience the power of the spreadsheet to unify and simplify math. Start with a parameter table, use rules to build function tables and models, then graph, analyze, and iterate the models to ask What if… The Tour is an interactive …
