Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)

The Numbers of Colors

In this CAMI meeting, Aren and Mark brought some tools for us to explore colors and play around with one way that humans have developed to quantify colors.

To get things started, we played around with a color slider. https://adultnumeracynetwork.org/Color-Sliders

Our task was to:

Create a color that is meaningful to you, or
Find the color that describes how you feel right now, or
Find your favorite color

I want to say thank you and goodbye for now. I’m taking a break from adult education for the rest of this year. I’ll be traveling and exploring other interests for a while. Starting in May 2025, my wife Alex and I will be biking from Vancouver, CA to San Diego. I’ll be posting photos and stories from the road at @eappleton on Instagram and birdfruit.wordpress.com.

Number Triangles

In this meeting, we started by looking at the following two images.

Prime Factor Stacks

Carol Cashion, teacher of math and other high school equivalency subjects at the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and I co-led this meeting. In October, I observed Carol’s class when she introduced factors using blocks. I was interested to see how the approach opened up a tangible way of playing with factors and concepts such as greatest common factor. In our teachers’ circle, Carol explained her lesson plan and then we explored “prime factor stacks” as a problem-posing and problem-solving method. -Eric

What Would I Think If I Didn’t Know?

For this meeting, Sarah invited us to explore the weird and wonderful world of numbers between 0 and 1. We started with a notice/wonder on this set of equations (suggested by Eric):

Happy Numbers

For this month’s meeting, we returned to explore some numbers we first encountered in CAMI back in 2015 (Happy Numbers and the Melancoil).

After some community building, we started our exploration with a notice/wonder of this diagram.

Sarah’s Passing Drill

In another edition of revisiting problems from the CAMI vaults, at this month’s meeting we went back to further explore a number pattern we first looked at in January 2017 (Carl’s Basketball Problem).

We started off discussing WHAT IS SIMILAR? WHAT IS DIFFERENT? looking at these four expressions:

Sequences of Fractions

In this meeting, we deconstructed a problem from NCTM’s Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, using a few ideas from The Art of Problem Posing, by Stephen I. Brown and Marion I. Walter.

Here’s the original problem:

Diagonals in Rectangles

2024 marks the 10th anniversary of CAMI (!) and to honor all we have learned and all the ways we have grown as a group, we are going into the vaults for a few CAMI meeting, to reopen and revisit some of our early explorations together. This month’s meeting was a new take on a problem we explored in June 2016 at Making and Testing Conjectures: The Diagonal Problem.

We started with a Which One Doesn’t Belong?