Despite the many attempts to codify the creative process, it is as surprisingly individualistic as it is human. John Irving, author of iconic works like The Cider House Rules, describes his creative process as writing the conclusion before the beginning. He spends a year or more developing a story, the plot, and a set of …
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. I was reading a delightful book on physics by Richard Muller called, Now, in which mixing physics and history, he explained time and in that process, physics as well. I …
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 soon to come crowds. It was on one of those pretend spring is here days in February that we went to visit a dear friend on the Cape and then …
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 …
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 that promote readiness for school transitions and prepare students for STEM careers. We developed a new model for creatively solving digital age problems that we call Functional Thinking. And we …
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 imagine students learning science without doing experiments. We don’t imagine them learning technology without writing code, or learning engineering without building models, or learning art without messing with paint, clay, …
We have made a big deal of the times table and of other tables.Now we extend the times table to negative numbers and thus to all 4 quadrants of the real number space. We hope to build student intuition about this space and to gain a spatial sense of graphing as well as of multiplication. …
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 been one of good fortune. Some great ideas can appear huge from the start, covering wide swaths of life, and some, at first, can seem small, almost insignificant initially, but …
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 world war that brought down the ruling monarchies of Europe. A tax on tea turned into a revolution. Such a small change occurred in America’s classrooms a little over a …
Spreadsheets offer us a nearly unlimited ability to develop and learn from case studies using real world data. We will focus mainly on climate change which is an area rich in possibilities and of great interest to students. In this case study we look at the production of carbon dioxide per person in the United …
