Subtitle: Why you should create a course shell for every course you teach, and not just the online courses. I’m teaching Math for Elementary Teachers this Fall semester for the first time in several years. The last time I...
Read MoreThis week I have been participating in the MAA PREP course, Calculus: Online and Interactive. I was asked to give a presentation on online course design for mathematics, and the presentation was recorded. This is a loooooong one...
Read MoreIn case you missed this, there’s a great Wall Street Journal article and blog post about Wolfram Alpha … Sum Help: New Search Engine for Mathletes (The Wall Street Journal, 6/16/09) Wolfram Alpha, A New Online...
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The title of this post, “Everybody teaches, everybody learns.” is a shared vision for those of us...
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This post recounts the author’s experience participating in a GameJam, a timed contest of design and creativity, where participants had to design the core concepts of a game in under three hours. The author’s team brainstormed ideas that would involve long-term and short-term goal setting and settled on designing a videogame based on campaigning for political office. The team had to come up with gameplay and mini-games, as well as visually and verbally document the game so that it could be judged. Despite the challenge, the author and their team were able to create a game called Permanent Campaign, which they presented to the judges, including game designer Will Wright.
Read MoreThe author attended a game design workshop conducted by Brenda Brathwaite, which highlighted the importance of knowing game design constraints to streamline game ideas. The author and the participants of the workshop were tasked with designing a video game where the objective was to decide the winner in a Civil War battle without the use of combat or territorial acquisition. The workshop provided valuable insights into how game design could be a powerful tool to motivate creative thinking and can be applied to learning mathematics.
Read MoreWolfram|Alpha is a “computational search engine” built by Wolfram Research (the developers of Mathematica). W|A (pronounce this as “walpha” if you’d like) is similar in appearance to the search engines that we are used to and...
Read MoreI’ve had almost two weeks to think about the impact of Wolfram|Alpha (abbreviated as W|A, and now pronounced by me as “Walpha”), and I’m ready to share some of my thoughts with you. After spending...
Read MoreFinally, I’ve made a sequel to Funky Function Notation. Here is Intriguing Inverses. Feel free to use it in online courses or use in the classroom. Enjoy.
Read MoreThis post highlights the potential impact of Wolfram|Alpha on the course curriculum in math and chemistry. It provides examples of how the tool can be used in chemistry, such as converting units, providing detailed chemistry information, comparing the chemistry of different elements or compounds, and solving chemical formulas. The author emphasizes the importance of exploring the possibilities of integrating Wolfram|Alpha into teaching and learning strategies.
Read MoreMargaret Wertheim speaks at TED about the beautiful mathematics of coral reefs, hyperbolic geometry, and more. In particular, I liked her bit (around the 8-minute mark) where she says that if zero and one are already possible...
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This post contains 15 screenshots from the early release of WolframAlpha that shows the implications for math education.
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