Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
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:
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?
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:
In April’s evening CAMI meeting, Audrey led us through an exploration of star polygons…at a safe distance.
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.
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.
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.
