teachers learning math together
The session opened with a wonder and notice of this image:
Participants noticed that the number of dots in each figure is increasing by one as you look left to right in each row. One person said they see certain groupings of dots repeated in other groupings. Another noticed that the dots are arranged in a circle for some numbers and someone else wondered if that was because those numbers are prime.
Continue reading “Number Visuals”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.
Inspired by the hit TV show The Queen’s Gambit, we tackled a chess puzzle in February’s evening meeting. Sophie shared a problem from one of Alex Bellos’s recent Monday Math Puzzles. Here it is:
Before we went into our breakout rooms, we spent a bit of time clarifying the ways that a Queen can move on the board, and making sure we agreed about which squares were “unattacked” or “safe.” (We had some debate about the square that the Queen is sitting on. In the end, we decided that this was not a safe square.)
Check out the Jamboard to see some of the work we did (or don’t, if you don’t want any spoilers!) One question we found intriguing was, “how do you know when you’ve found the best answer?”
Since then, many of us have been playing chess on chess.com. We’re even thinking about starting a CAMI chess club. Want to play? Send us a message and we’ll loop you in.
In the December evening meeting, Amy Vickers led us through a new exploration that was loosely inspired by last month’s meeting on some circles.
As a warm-up, Amy presented us with this question: Why might a manhole cover (or, in the gender-neutral, maintenance cover) be round? One of the central ideas that came up in the resulting discussion was that a circle won’t fall through its own hole, no matter which way you turn it. It has a constant diameter, or constant width.
In CAMI Meetings and in class with students, we often want a prompt to get students generating their own mathematical questions to answer, rather than giving them a predetermined math problem that everyone needs to solve. In the November evening meeting, we started off by considering some prompts and sentence starters to get students asking questions that will lead to math explorations.
Here are a sentence-starters that we came up with:
And a few questions we can ask to get students thinking mathematically:
What questions do you ask students to get them thinking? What kinds of questions do you want them to ask themselves?
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”We started with a quick game of online Simon Says.
It was okay, but a little clunky. Usha suggested a different kind of activity where video on means yes and video off means no. Read a series of statements. Here are a few I brainstormed: Winter is my favorite season of the year. I love ice cream. I am excited to be back in school. I want to go to college. (You probably have better examples.) End with a statement everyone can say yes to…
Continue reading “Rainbow Squares”Whole Group
We started this meeting with a Which One Doesn’t Belong which also included talking about what the four pictures have in common:
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:
In this meeting, we explored Henri Piccioto’s number pyramid puzzles through notice/wonder, generating questions for problem-solving and additional puzzles for students.
At the beginning of the meeting, we shared some favorite sources of puzzles we like to use with students, include Which One Doesn’t Belong, Sometimes, Always, Never, and Open Middle.
Then I introduced Number Pyramids. Thank you to Henri Piccioto and his amazing web site of math resources. Here is the sequence we used:
