Posted in Geometry

Pentagon to Quadrilateral Puzzle

Puzzles involving cutting shapes and forming them into different shapes helps reinforce the idea that area do not necessarily change with change in shape. It is also a good activity for developing visualisation skill and spatial ability.

The puzzle below is from one of the leaflets at the booth of Japan Society of Mathematical Education last ICME 12 in Seoul, Korea. The original puzzle is suited for Grade 4. The instruction was to cut the pentagon along the dotted lines and then form them into the shapes shown. The shapes shown in the leaflet is a parallelogram, a rectangle, an isosceles trapezoid, and a general trapezoid. I modified the puzzle for students in the higher level. I have indicated the measure of the two angles just in case you want your students to justify that the pieces really form into quadrilaterals. This is one way to assess your students knowledge of the properties of these parallelograms, trapezoid and trapezoids as they justify each shape formed.

pentagon puzzle

Here are two solutions – rectangle and isosceles trapezoid. Form the other two shapes.

trapezium and rectangle

Posted in Math videos, Number Sense

911 math assistance service

A four-year old calling 911 for math assistance.

History tells us that zero was invented much later than most of the numbers. It was not even accepted as a number right away. Why should we expect a four-year old to think of it then? And take-aways without context for them?

Anyway, this video is cute. The police has some teaching skill. Enjoy it.

Posted in Math videos

A 21st century skill: reading and writing codes

In Should We Do Away with Calculation, Conrad Wolfram says that if you want to know if students understands a computational procedure, ask them to do a program, let them code it.Here is another video which calls students to learn coding. The video titled What Schools Don’t Teach featuring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, and other software developer giants speaking, urges kids to learn how to write codes. Reading and writing codes should now indeed be part of our curriculum. And for the arts inclined? Well to borrow from WordPress: ‘Code is poetry’.

What schools don’t teach video promotes code.org, a nonprofit foundation created to help computer programming education grow.

To drive the point, see the graph below from code.org.

computer programming

Posted in Math videos, Mathematics education

Should we do away with calculation?

We don’t need to spend much time with calculation. Technology can do that for us. We can use the extra time saved for engaging in ‘higher-level’ thinking. Mr. Conrad Wolfram in his TEd Education Talk makes a lot of sense in this video. But, I have my reservations but not because I’m for teaching a lot of calculations.

We also said the same during the era of calculator. Did it improve the math education of our youth? So, what makes us think it will happen in the age of Mathematica, GeoGebra, Sketchpad? There is something in our math classes or math education that’s stuck in the middle ages, that’s not keeping with time. Unless we find and address this, no amount of technology can help us.