Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Math Circles Workshop

Today was the first day of a week long workshop put on by a local chapter of math teacher circles.  What a fun day!  We spent the morning working on problems and talking about problem solving.  An amazing group of high school students from Los Angeles presented a workshop this afternoon about their work in The Algebra Project and the Young People Project.

This was a big take away for me from the morning session.  Any guesses on what it is?

9 comments:

  1. A spatial multiplication table?

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  2. Avery, I was there! I will look forward to meeting you tomorrow evening, at the banquet. I loved the 3-color games we did with the Young People's Project folks.

    (What do you look like? Will you email me? suevanhattum on hotmail)

    I'm doing the Thursday afternoon workshop.

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  3. Oh! Pretty! What was the take away from it? Do younger kids find it easier to grasp? Or just that it was new to you? I've never seen it before!

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  4. Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed the multiplication table.

    Among other things, I hope the takeaways include: Using area as a model makes multiplication easier to understand. It also makes the distributive property visual. It can give us an easy way of summing all the numbers in the multiplication table. For *some* younger kids, it turns a big pile of numbers into something with real visual meaning to them.

    http://www.msri.org/specials/festival/activities/MultiplicationTable.pdf and especially http://www.msri.org/specials/festival/activities/MultiplicationPascal.pdf have some more nice multiplication table facts.

    The first link there has a nice question: you can use the multiplication table, as Avery pointed out to me on Monday, to prove that (1+2+...+n)^2 = 1^3 + 2^3 + ... + n^3. The question is, for what lists of numbers other than 1 through n is this true? (I think I know a way of generating tons of lists for which this is true, but I don't know a way of proving that this way generates every possible list).

    The second link has a nice relationship between the multiplication table and pascal's triangle, specifically the sums of the / diagonals of the multiplication table and the tetrahedral numbers.

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  5. Just found your blog via Sue's blog. Loving it! Are there math circle meetings in the south bay/peninsula area? I'm a sci teacher in San Jose, but it sounds really interesting.

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  6. @ Sue: Nice meeting you last night!

    @ Sam: Josh did a great job of summing up many of the ways this representation can be powerful. I have to say that the basic reminder that multiplication can be modeled with rectangular areas is really nice. I wonder if other models for multiplication (such as stretching the number line) could somehow be represented in a "times tables?"

    @Josh: Thanks for replying to Sam (ie doing all the work).

    @Jason: Thanks for stopping by. As for meetings in the south bay, check out:
    http://www.mathteacherscircle.org/circle/
    http://math.stanford.edu/circle/

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  7. Avery,
    For peninsula/south bay math circles, you can add to your list: http://www.sanjosemathcircle.org .

    And maybe http://funmathclub.com .

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