A well-crafted classroom engineering challenge can effectively answer compelling questions about social and global responsibility.
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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.
Enrique Ortiz
Two original images were inspired by the use of an art studio app for digital drawings. This artistic process could be used to help created other original art and during See-Think-Wonder routines emphasizing meaningful observations and questioning skills.
Stacy K. Boote and Terrie M. Galanti
Elementary school students use physical manipulatives (e.g., pattern blocks) to make sense of the geometry and measurement ideas in a Code.org block-based programming lesson.
Jen Munson, Geetha Lakshminarayanan, and Thomas J. Rodney
Off You Go is a PK–12 mathematical routine that leverages children’s home resources and assets to support them in developing conceptual precision. We provide a guide for how to adapt this routine to engage students at any grade in argumentation and attending to precision.
Chris Harrow and Justin Gregory Johns
Problems to Ponder provides 28 varying, classroom-ready mathematics problems that collectively span PK–12, arranged in the order of the grade level. Answers to the problems are available online. Individuals are encouraged to submit a problem or a collection of problems directly to mtlt@nctm.org. If published, the authors of problems will be acknowledged.
Mindy Kalchman
Process-oriented, question-asking techniques provide a framework for approaching modern challenges, including modality pivots and student agency.
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.
Hyunyi Jung, Megan H. Wickstrom, and Chris Piasecki
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch activity involves an urgent environmental issue that students can discuss. It engages students in the interpretation of visual data, measurements, units, and the area of regular and irregular figures.
