Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
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:
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?
I decided to lead a meeting on function diagrams because I’m intrigued by the possibilities of teaching with them and because I wanted to introduce the resources that the math educator Henri Picciotto makes available. I have to admit that I haven’t spent that much time thinking about to teach with function diagrams, but I was interested to see what we can learn together by exploring this visualization.
Continue reading “Function Diagrams”In this meeting, Amy introduced the story table, which is a teaching tool for solving algebraic equations. Story tables allow us to use guess and check and then analyze patterns in the results, in order to find values of x that make equations true.
To get us started, Amy shared the following algebraic equation:
3x - 2 = 10
And asked us to tell the story of x. To find a solution in this story, Amy asked us for the moment not use other ways of solving equations.
Sarah and Eric have been teaching themselves how to code using Javascript, CSS, and HTML. The What Comes Next? game is the result of more than a year’s work. We are not fast coders! We used this meeting to share our game and to see if teachers might use it with their students.
To play the game: What Comes Next?
Continue reading “What Comes Next?”For the last CAMI meeting before the 2022 summer break, we explored and created hanger diagrams. The session began with a notice and wonder of this hanger.
Cindy started the meeting by asking participants to draw rectangles in Jamboard using the graph paper background.
Tip: To make a straight line in Jamboard, hold down the shift key!
Sarah and I have been meeting once a week to teach ourselves some basic coding. Our first project was a function game. We are currently working on another game involving sequences, which got us thinking about the sequences in this meeting.
Sarah started this meeting by asking the group to consider the following prompt.
Sophie led us through the following problem from the Museum of Math’s weekly puzzle during COVID. Sign up for emails from MoMath.
PUZZLE: Coconut Classic
Five men and a monkey, marooned on an island, collect a pile of coconuts to be divided equally the next morning. During the night, however, one of the men decides he’d rather take his share now. He tosses one coconut to the monkey and removes exactly 1/5 of the remaining coconuts for himself. A second man does the same thing, then the third, fourth, and fifth. The following morning the men wake up together, toss one more coconut to the monkey, and divide the rest equally.What’s the least original number of coconuts needed to make this whole scenario possible?
Mind-Benders for the Quarantined! (Museum of Math, NYC)
We had a lot of interesting ideas and shared a few strategies, but we didn’t get to a solution.
Continue reading “A pile of coconuts”In this meeting, we explored the sums of consecutive numbers (inspired by a CAMI meeting led by Usha Kotelawala in June 2017). The meeting is also based on a two-day lesson I led with the support of other teachers during summer 2020 problem-solving meetings with CUNY adult education students.
Before the meeting, I shared this post on the CAMI email list:
