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?
Setting the Table
Category: Why Things Work
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.
Continue reading “Welcoming the Negative”How do bikes work?
The inspiration for this meeting came from a bike touring trip I took in May/June of 2025, from Vancouver, Canada to San Diego, California. (To see photos and read about the trip: https://birdfruit.wordpress.com.)
I started the meeting by asking participants to draw a bicycle from memory. You might found it’s harder than you think. Give it a try.
Continue reading “How do bikes work?”Elementary Cellular Automata
To launch our explorations we noticed and wondered about several images:
This is the first one:
What do you notice? What do you wonder?
Continue reading “Elementary Cellular Automata”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
Continue reading “What do you see?: Attention & imagination in math”Personal Aesthetics & Math
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
What Would I Think If I Didn’t Know?
For this meeting, Aren 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.
