Math Dictionary, Math App and Smarter Babies
There is so much math goodness on the web this week, that we are bursting at the seams and need to share our finds with the world!
First up, a math dictionary for kids (and adults). Now, we did mention in one of our newsletters that we were working on creating a math dictionary for the Moebius Noodles book. Our goal was to avoid formulas and connect rigorous and concise mathematical definitions to everyday experiences and objects. It was both difficult and fun.
This week we saw a post and a video on MathFour blog about an online math dictionary for kids. We checked it out and yes, it’s terrific! Instead of just reading, you get to take each definition for a spin, sometimes quite literally (as with “rotation” and “rotational symmetry”). It seems to be designed with older kids in mind, but pre-readers can explore it with your help. Ability to print out the results of your experiments is an added bonus.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm21wuVLB6E
If you have an iPad or an iPhone you are likely on the lookout for new math apps. Check out the freshly released and free MIT-P app. Designed by the Embodied Design Research Laboratory (EDRL) at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and built by Terasoft, the Mathematical Imagery Trainer for Proportion (MIT-P) is “designed to support discovery-based instruction of multiplicative concepts, primarily proportion.”
I’ll do a separate review of our experience with the MIT-P app next week. Even though this app is designed primarily with elementary- and middle-schoolers in mind, let your younger child try anyway. After all, babies are smarter than we think.
According to the 2009 NYT article by Alison Gopnik, “in some ways, [babies and very young children] are smarter than adults”. It’s a great article to keep in mind whenever we feel inclined to teach our young kids anything, including math. It explains why certain techniques that work with older kids will not and physically cannot work with younger ones. It also talks about the most effective way of teaching young kids and it is surprisingly simple.
Posted in Make
Snowflakes! Newsletter December 15, 2012
Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Book News
This week, we attended the Triangle Creative Commons mini-conference, celebrating ten years of CC sharing. We met some wonderful people who work in very interesting CC-licensed projects – some of them are joining our math adventures! Meanwhile, here are our slides.
Special snowflakes!
Happy holidays! Make some mathy snowflakes with us and our friends. There is a snowflake chapter in the Moebius Noodles book, after all. Here is an excerpt with several smart mini-games for snowflake math.
Surprise family and friends with snowflakes made out of their names, or holiday wish words – love, happiness, math. Here is online software called Special Snowflake that can help you plan a paper project, or make an animated name snowflake for your site. Do you see my name in the snowflake below?
Whenever you do math, use words and images that are special for your child. Another take on this idea is to make snowflakes about favorite games, characters and other beloved roleplaying images. Sue VanHattum of Math Mama Writes sent us this beautiful example at Anthony Herrera Designs. Do you recognize this popular fantasy universe?
Sharing
You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com
More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA
Talk to you again on January 15th – next year!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
The Hundred Chart
Check out my newest home decor item, a hundred chart. The amount of work I put into it, I consider getting it framed to be proudly displayed in the living room. The thing is monumental in several ways:
1. It is monumentally different from my usual approach to choosing math aids. My rule is if it takes me more than 5 minutes to prepare a math manipulative, I skip it and find another way.
2. It is monumentally time-consuming to create from scratch all by yourself.
3. It is monumentally fun to show to a child.
My son, like many other kids, is fascinated with big, huge, stupendous numbers – a million, a billion, a googol. He is also comfortable with very small numbers, all the way up to 7 or 8. But the space in between, particularly the first hundred, is confusing and thus boring to him.
Some of the math tools we’ve tried so far – fingers, counting sticks, pebbles, marbles, counting bears, abacus, Cuisinaire rods, the number line, even (gasp) rote memorization… No matter what we tried, number facts for anything greater than 7 remained incomprehensible.
Getting slightly desperate, I spent several evenings making this chart. It doesn’t look exactly like the usual hundred charts. Instead, each number has bars underneath. There are bars for units and there are bars for tens and 100 has a bar for hundreds. Each bar is made up of 2 rows of 5 cells. So, the number 35 has 3 bars in the tens space and one bar in the units space. All three of the tens bars are colored in, but only 5 cells of the unit bar are colored.
The idea is not mine, but taken from an old Russian book by Nikolay Zaitsev. In it, Zaitsev explains that with a chart like this, a child gets to see exactly what each number is made of and develops an idea of place value without lengthy and confusing explanations.
We’ve just started working with this hundred chart. By this I mean we finished putting it together, looked at it, counted to 55 or so, then skip counted by 10 to 100. Oh, and my son put stickers on the most important numbers (the ages of all family members, our cat and Preston Stormer, his fave toy of the moment). Along the way, my son asked some terrific questions that never came up before:
1. Why are the numbers from the bottom repeat in all over numbers?
2. What are these bars and why not all of them are colored in? Can I help you color them in? How many do I color in for this number? Why?
3. Look, if I go this way (moving from right to left), numbers are getting smaller! And this way too! (top to bottom)
4. (Halfway through chart-making) I think you will run out of space because the cards are getting bigger. How many cards can fit on the board?
5. Why are there more bars for this number (78) than here (18)?
I gave my son a couple of left-over cards since I printed a couple of pages twice. He was busy drawing on them and coloring in the cells. Then he created his own card for the number 5 (this is how many weapons of a certain type Preston Stormer has on him):
He now stops by this hundred chart a few times each day. And the most frequently asked question nowadays seems to be when are we going to expand this chart.
Posted in Grow
Cover art & glossary: Newsletter November 30, 2012
Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Book news
The book cover is almost ready! Do you like it? What would you change?
This week, we’ve been working on a glossary of main terms. We wanted each definition…
- Mathematically correct
- Accessible to math-anxious people
- Engaging for mathy people
- To have a clear example
- To have a clear counter-example
This is surprisingly challenging! We like how our definitions turn out, though. Check out these examples.
Function
Functions are machines that convert values to other values, or find correspondences between values. Function machines work by rules people make up. The starting values are called input. The converted or corresponding values are called output. The rule must find a single output for each input. Your stove is a function machine: it starts with the input of raw eggs, milk and spices, and makes the output of an omelet. The fantasy machine that starts with the same input and makes either omelets or live chickens is not a function.
Inverse Function
What a function does, the inverse will undo. Of course, some deeds cannot be undone. The function of “baby drops a cup of grapes on the floor” has an inverse, “parental unit crawls around, searching for grapes and putting them back into the cup”. On the other hand, the function of “drop a cup of orange juice on the floor” and the function “break an egg for an omelet” do not have inverses.
Cycle
Cycles are sequences of objects or series of operations that repeat. For example, “winter, spring, summer, autumn” is the cycle of seasons that repeats every year. There are cyclic stories and songs, like “99 bottles of beer.” Many household tasks are cyclic, such as washing dishes – “lather, rinse, repeat.” Cycles relate to recursion and iteration. Not all infinite sequences have cycles; for example, there are no cycles in the digits of Pi.
The mindmap for the glossary helps to see relationships between ideas. And it drives home the message that math is not linear.
Sharing
You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com
More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA
Talk to you again on December 15th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
