Mark Trushkowsky

Setting the Table

At the heart of this meeting was the following table, shared by math educator Howie Hua:

What do you notice? What patterns do you observe?

Welcoming the Negative

At this meeting, looking for something new in the familiar, we explored subtraction.

We challenged ourselves to find methods to subtract, beyond the standard algorithm of “borrowing” (which is not really “borrowing” at all!). Then we used those methods as leaping off points to ask questions to push our understanding about how subtraction works.

Prime Factorization Graphs

To launch our explorations, we looked at these two graphs:

What do you see?: Attention & imagination in math

Sometimes CAMI meetings have a mind of their own. This one followed a direction we didn’t expect!

We started with a question about this image:

The catch? We wanted to spark our creativity by exploring the world of wrong answers.

What is the Area? WRONG ANSWERS ONLY

Personal Aesthetics & Math

Here are four paintings by the artist Mark Rothko.
Which of these paintings are you drawn to?
Tell about it.

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

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:

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?

Math Art Challenges

Annie Perkins is a middle school/high school math teacher in Minneapolis, MN and she has been sharing a daily math art challenge every day since the governor’s made the call for everyone to stay at home. As I write this, we are going on Day 19.