teachers learning math together
Using number pyramids to practice adding signed numbers leads to a surprising discovery.
Jane started the meeting by telling us that her class has been studying signed numbers recently. She has been looking for creative ways for them to understand adding and subtracting signed numbers. One example was to imagine taking away negativity as the same thing as making someone happier.
A big thank you to Turning Point for hosting us this month and raising the bar for all future hosts. We started with a tour of TP’s building and saw their classrooms, offices, and rooftop deck (!). Evidence of great student work is everywhere with student posters and presentations on the diverse topics of supply and demand, classified ads for housing, and dice and probability. It was wonderful to see such a beautiful, well-established community-based education program with full-time staff. And they provided refreshments!
For this meeting, we looked at Pascal’s Triangle, since it came up in discussion at the end of the October craps meeting Continue reading “Pascal’s Triangle”
What are the odds of winning at craps? Is craps a fair game? What’s your chance of making the point? A three-act math task inspires some questions in probability.
We began by watching a clip from the move, A Bronx Tale. (Be warned: there is some… colorful language in this clip)
Our work on this month’s problem led us to the beginning of a larger exploration of a very curious repeated loop in a certain sequence of numbers.
This month’s problem comes from the 2015 Stanford-Math League Tournament Individual Questions for grades 6 & 7.
This was the third time CAMI tried out using a 3-Act math task. This one is called Royal Flush and is organized around the probability of a poker hand in Texas Hold’em.
Do you play cards? What kinds of cards do you play? What do cards have to do with probability?
For our second three-act math task, we learn it is sometimes just as interesting when mathematical models do not work and we have to figure out why.
This week, CAMI continued learning about Dan Meyer’s three-act math model by working on the Super Stairs problem. In keeping with the three-act framework, we started the meeting by watching the short video
below a few times and then posing some questions. Continue reading “Three-Act Math: Super Stairs”
The CAMI Roadshow worked with teachers at the 2015 NYC ABE Conference
We talked about problem-posing and inspiring student curiosity in math as we tried out a three-act math task created by Dan Meyer
To start off the meeting, in pairs we discussed – “Real life math”: What does it mean to you? In your classrooms?
At this CAMI meeting we looked at 3 different problems:
What does it mean for a decision to be democratic? What role can math play? We explore 7 different voting methods to find out (and name our math teacher circle).
So before our last meeting (Feb. 2015), we sent out an electronic survey to choose a name for our group. Teachers were asked to put the 12 choices in their order of preference from most preferred to least preferred.
Mark presented the results from the electronic survey to name our group. Here are the Results from Online Survey he created. Rather than announce a winner, Mark asked everyone to take a few minutes to look over the report. Continue reading “The Mathematics of How CAMI Got Its Name”
