An escape room can be a great way for students to apply and practice mathematics they have learned. This article describes the development and implementation of a mathematical escape room with important principles to incorporate in escape rooms to help students persevere in problem solving.
Browse
Kelly Hagan and Cheng-Yao Lin
April 2020's GPS department provides tasks for each grade band that invite students to reason with age-appropriate number theoretic concepts.
Erell Germia and Nicole Panorkou
We present a Scratch task we designed and implemented for teaching and learning coordinates in a dynamic and engaging way. We use the 5Es framework to describe the students' interactions with the task and offer suggestions of how other teachers may adopt it to successfully implement Scratch tasks.
Erin E. Baldinger, Matthew P. Campbell, and Foster Graif
Students need opportunities to construct definitions in mathematics. We describe a sorting activity that can help students construct and refine definitions through discussion and argumentation. We include examples from our own work of planning and implementing this sorting activity to support constructing a definition of linear function.
Rebecca Vinsonhaler and Alison G. Lynch
This article focuses on students use and understanding of counterexamples and is part of a research project on the role of examples in proving. We share student interviews and offer suggestions for how teachers can support student reasoning and thinking and promote productive struggle by incorporating counterexamples into the classroom.
Karen S. Karp, Sarah B. Bush, and Barbara J. Dougherty
Try these meaningful alternative approaches to helping students make sense of word problems.
Aaron M. Rumack and DeAnn Huinker
Capturing students' own observations before solving a problem propelled a culture of sense making by meeting needs typical of middle school learners.
Lee Melvin M. Peralta
One of the many benefits of teaching mathematics is having the opportunity to encounter unexpected mathematical connections while planning lessons or exploring ideas with students and colleagues. Consider the two problems in figure 1.
Laurie Speranzo and Erik Tillema
Specific teacher moves and lesson planning can facilitate student empowerment in the middle school classroom.
Emily Dardis and Megan H. Wickstrom
Modifications to a first- and second-grade STEAM activity, Elephant Toothpaste, highlight ways to emphasize mathematical thinking by running multiple experiments, posing mathematical questions, and having students make both qualitative and quantitative observations. Contributors to the iSTEM department share ideas and activities that stimulate student interest in the integrated fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K–grade 5 classrooms.
