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
Tag: factors
Prime Factorization Graphs
To launch our explorations, we looked at these two graphs:
Prime Factor Stacks
Carol Cashion, teacher of math and other high school equivalency subjects at the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and I co-led this meeting. In October, I observed Carol’s class when she introduced factors using blocks. I was interested to see how the approach opened up a tangible way of playing with factors and concepts such as greatest common factor. In our teachers’ circle, Carol explained her lesson plan and then we explored “prime factor stacks” as a problem-posing and problem-solving method. -Eric
Continue reading “Prime Factor Stacks”Sarah’s Passing Drill
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:
Diagonals in Rectangles
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?
Factor Graphs
Sarah Lonberg-Lew of the Adult Numeracy Network and SABES joined us from Gloucester, MA to lead this meeting with me (honestly, I did very little). We explored a diagram that Play With Your Math calls factor graphs. They got the idea from Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, by the mathematician and educator Matt Parker. (Check out Numberphile for some of his videos.)
The week before the meeting we sent out this teaser:
Star Polygons!
In April’s evening CAMI meeting, Audrey led us through an exploration of star polygons…at a safe distance.
Playing with Prime Factors
Starting with a colorful visual representation of numbers, we looked at a series of problems based on prime factors.
For the last few months, I’ve been working on study materials on exponents and roots. While doing research for the packet, I started to get interested in factors and especially prime factors. It turns out that they are really useful for thinking about lots of different kinds of math that we have been looking recently. For example, the mathematics of bicycle gears or Spirograph both have to do with factors, as do fractions, place value, exponents and other math that is relevant to math teaching in adult literacy.
Continue reading “Playing with Prime Factors”A Strange Algorithm
In our first evening meeting, Eric shared a web site that turns pairs of numbers in diagrams. But how does it work?
(This meeting was based on an underground mathematics lesson, Fawn Nguyen’s post and Michael Lawler’s videos. Thank you all!)
I started the meeting by showing the group the Picture This! web site that turns pairs of numbers into a diagram visualization. I asked for a volunteer to give me two numbers, each less than 10. The first suggestion was 3 & 7. I entered the number into Picture This and this diagram was returned.
Factor Towers
Eric shared activities from a draft lesson on factors, multiples, primes and composites. The lesson is linked in the post if you are interested in using the materials from the meeting. He would love feedback if you use it with a class.
Launch
To start off the meeting, Eric put us into groups and gave each group a bag of paper tiles. He asked us to spend a few minutes looking at them and discussing anything we noticed.
