Author: Mark Trushkowsky

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:

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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?

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Temperature is Cool

How do the functions for converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit work? Temperature talk during the coldest week of 2019 thus far.

At our evening CAMI meeting earlier this month, Kevin Winkler from CUNY Start led us in an exploration of the conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit based on something strange he noticed while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

I wanted to bring that idea to the afternoon CAMI meeting, and also try to scaffold the exploration a bit, so that we could extend the invitation to our students. It also just happened to be the week where the Midwest was experiencing such cold weather that friends in Minnesota kept making the same joke over and over again about the temperatures there being colder than they were in Antarctica.

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Factor Towers

Eric shared activities from a draft lesson on factors, multiples, primes and composites. The lesson is linked in the post if you are interested in using the materials from the meeting. He would love feedback if you use it with a class.

Launch

To start off the meeting, Eric put us into groups and gave each group a bag of paper tiles. He asked us to spend a few minutes looking at them and discussing anything we noticed.

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CAMI Roadshow: 2018 NYC Adult Basic Education Conference

NYC CAMI revisited the Grid Power problem and modeled the collective problem-posing/problem-solving process of CAMI meetings.

At this year’s NYC ABE Conference, Jane, Eric and Mark brought back the Grid Power problem from the summer 0f 2016.

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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Multiplication Tables

Looking for the surprising in the familiar, we see what happens when you look, really look, at the multiplication table and tumble through the looking glass.

I once taught a poem by Wallace Stevens called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to a class of adult literacy students. Before I gave out the poem I put the title on the board and asked students what they thought the poem was going to be about. They had all kinds of ideas about looking at blackbirds. Then I asked them, “What about the first part? What does that mean Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird?”And they said things like:

  • “Thirteen ways to understand the bird is better than one… but you have to take time to see the bird.”
  • “If you look at the bird you will find all the different things it does, but you have to look closely.”
  • “We don’t pay attention to these things and he wants us to focus.”
  • “He stopped to pay attention to something so maybe we will too.”

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Mondrian Art Puzzle

CAMI plays around with a way to practice multiplication, think about area and extend into algebra and generalizations. Through art!

For our final CAMI meeting of 2017, I wanted to spend some time at a CAMI meeting doing some math that would create some thing visual and beautiful. As I was looking around for activities to bring to the group, I came across the website, Math Pickle (as in “Put your students in a pickle”). They had a trove of math problems that I look forward to exploring in future CAMI meetings. The one I chose for this one is at its core an opportunity for students to practice multiplication in a way that is much more engaging than just memorizing facts and doing worksheets. And it builds works of art. As I started to play around with it, I started to notice different ways to think about how to make designs with the best score. Continue reading “Mondrian Art Puzzle”

Can you fit more boxes in a shipping container than Jane can?

Exploring some of the mathematics in packing a shipping container.

For today’s CAMI meeting, Mark was trying out a draft of a lesson that he wrote with Eric involving volume and units in a workplace context. The problem we explored involves trying to fit rectangular boxes into a shipping container.  Continue reading “Can you fit more boxes in a shipping container than Jane can?”