teachers learning math together
For the first evening meeting of 2020, Greg Fein led us through an exploration of the card game, Set.
The meeting began with Greg passing out a few decks of the game Set and giving time for all to explore the cards. Some of us were familiar with the game, but for others this was the first time seeing these cards. We then shared our observations of the cards in the deck.
Continue reading “The Game of Set”For November’s evening meeting, Eric led us through an interesting exploration of past and present methods of determining how many congressional seats to apportion to states of various populations.
The meeting began with the following warm up:
An adult education program is hiring 37 teachers to teach at 3 different sites. Each teacher can work at one site only.
Site A: 1500 students/year
Site B: 1000 students/year
Site C: 100 students/year
How many teachers should go to each site?
Continue reading “Apportionment Math!”Solange shared some card puzzles and tricks that she has been playing with. Our job was to figure out how they worked.
The first card “trick” (more of a puzzle, really) was from Marilyn Burns’ blog. It’s called the 1-10 card investigation.
How are elections won and how would different voting methods affect the outcomes? For the September evening meeting, Usha led us through an exploration of the math behind elections.
A simple situation with a mother and daughter’s ages leads to many questions and interesting observations.
In August, at a summer board meeting of the Adult Numeracy Network, the fabulous Sarah Lonberg-Lew (@MathSarahLL) shared a problem. Well, it wasn’t really a problem, more like something she noticed. In the meeting, she asked what we noticed and what questions we might ask.
Solange led us in a meeting about teaching mathematics with a focus on discovery, investigation, and student thinking.
In this meeting, Solange presented us with the following problem:
Consider a collection of pennies with the following constraints:
When the pennies are put in groups of 2 there is one penny left over. When they are put in groups of three, five and six there is also one penny left over. But when they are put in groups of seven there are no pennies left over. How many pennies could there be?
Thank you to YouCubed.org for the problem.
Can you help us out? Can you find a solution? Can you find more than one? What strategies are you using?
Continue reading “Penny Collection”What if a few simple rules governed all life on earth? Audrey brought John Conway’s Game of Life to April’s evening CAMI meeting.
Below is an intro video to the Game of Life.
Usha and Iddo led us through an approach to exploring statistics.
A number of us were part of a lovely meeting a while back on statistics. Iddo Gal started the meeting by sharing an overview of a guide he and a few colleagues created for teaching civic statistics and statistical literacy. Iddo is presented at the U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics in Pennsylvania a few weeks after the CAMI meeting.
Continue reading “Civic Statistics and Statistical Literacy”Audrey introduced the group to a classic problem from optimal stopping theory (whatever that is). 🙂
If you’re on the search for a new secretary, how would you choose who to hire? For June’s evening CAMI meeting, Audrey shared a classic problem with the group:
There are N applicants for a secretarial position. The applicants are interviewed in random order, and you must accept or reject a candidate immediately after interviewing them.
After you reject someone, there is no way to bring them back.
There is only one position available. So as soon as you accept a candidate, you’re done. What strategy should you use in order to maximize the likelihood of hiring the best candidate out of the N applicants?
Some of the assumptions we used when exploring the problem:
We moved shapes around a 100-grid to find patterns that lead to algebraic generalizations.
Today’s problem was from this year’s annual meeting of the Adult Numeracy Network (ANN) at the COABE conference in New Orleans. Christin Smith, Patricia Helmuth, and Heidi Schuler-Jones led the group through a series of activities over the course of the day. The theme of the ANN annual meeting was the idea of revealing algebra in basic mathematics. In our CAMI meeting, we explored an activity that starts with adding on a 100-grid and finding patterns and then moves towards generalization.
Continue reading “Pentominoes!”
