Teachers have the opportunity to make mathematics relevant. We leveraged the popularity of Star Wars to engage students in exploring and connecting two dimensions and three dimensions to careers in toy design.
Browse
Arsalan Wares and David Custer
This pattern-related problem, appropriate for high school students, involves spatial visualization, promotes geometric and algebraic thinking, and relies on a no-cost computer software program.
Alessandra King, Sophia Ouanes, and Claire Doh
Students and teachers enjoy exploring the boundaries between mathematics and art.
Enrique Ortiz
Examine this geometric figure in light of a set of connections among fields such as architecture, geometry, science, sports, technology, and associated uses, models, and discoveries.
Gavin Cunningham and Siddhi Desai
We share how engaging in the mathematical process of 3D printing captured and elevated our interest in discovering the wonder, joy, and beauty of mathematics in the world around us.
Nasim Chenari
This article describes how fortuitous mathematical moments should be noticed, encouraged, embraced, and capitalized upon.
Enrique Ortiz
This article presents an example of discovering an idea through creative play. After some trial and error, I drew a wonderful image, which I later learned was a two-dimensional view of a four-dimensional shape called tesseract.
Megan H. Wickstrom
Preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) often enter their teacher preparation programs with procedural and underdeveloped understandings of area measurement and its applications. This is problematic given that area and the area model are used throughout K–Grade 12 to develop flexibility in students’ mathematical understanding and to provide them with a visual interpretation of numerical ideas. This study describes an intervention aimed at bolstering PSTs’ understanding of area and area units with respect to measurement and number and operations. Following the intervention, results indicate that PSTs had both an improved ability to solve area tiling tasks as well as increased flexibility in the strategies they implemented. The results indicate that PSTs, similar to elementary students, develop a conceptual understanding of area from the use of tangible tools and are able to leverage visualizations to make sense of multiplicative structure across different strategies.
Amanda K. Riske, Catherine E. Cullicott, Amanda Mohammad Mirzaei, Amanda Jansen, and James Middleton
We introduce the Into Math Graph tool, which students use to graph how “into" mathematics they are over time. Using this tool can help teachers foster conversations with students and design experiences that focus on engagement from the student’s perspective.
