Presenter
For the past 10 years,
Greg Tang has travelled across the United States doing more than 1,200 conferences, workshops and school visits. Along the way, he has taught more than 250,000 children and adults, helped write several math textbooks, authored 8 children’s books including a NY Times best seller, and created a family of innovative math puzzles and games.
Now, Greg is putting everything he has learned and created on one website. It is an important part of his mission to help children and adults of all ages become better in math. Greg is working hard to create better teaching methods, shift the focus to more critical, abstract thinking skills, and make important mathematical concepts easier and more intuitive.
Greg believes that to be good in math, children need to learn to think abstractly at an early age. When kids learn to think abstractly and efficiently about numbers in groups rather than counting or memorizing, they can be taught common sense strategies that make calculations fast and easy. Being able to connect and generalize these strategies across problems and operations is the key to thinking algebraically and the secret to being smart.
It is a common misconception that people who are good in math are good at memorizing. Quite the contrary, they’re abstract thinkers who are good at understanding and generalizing concepts, then applying them to different problems and situations.
About the project
BOOKS: Ten years ago, Greg Tang was looking for a better way to teach math to his kids. He wound up creating a groundbreaking series of picture books that included the New York Times best seller The Grapes of Math. His books quickly became staples in school libraries and university teacher training programs, garnering numerous awards and selling over a million copies. The free online version of Grapes of Math:
http://gregtangmath.com/Books/Books?bookID=grapes
GAMES: We’ve designed games that teach kids to think about numbers the right way. No more counting. No more memorizing. No more procedures learned by rote. Instead, games that develop good number sense and strong mental math skills by teaching kids to break numbers apart in smart ways. They also provide the repetition and practice that leads to mastery.
Our games are different in two important ways. First, we focus on strategies and answers, not just answers. Getting the right answer is important, but so is thinking quickly and efficiently. Our strategies lay the groundwork for higher math - and also get the answers right. Second, our games are full of math - not something else. While other games give kids non-math incentives to play more, our games reward kids for doing math . . . with more math. Imagine, kids being so challenged and engaged that they want to do more math problems!
GAMES: We’ve designed games that teach kids to think about numbers the right way. No more counting. No more memorizing. No more procedures learned by rote. Instead, games that develop good number sense and strong mental math skills by teaching kids to break numbers apart in smart ways. They also provide the repetition and practice that leads to mastery.
Our games are different in two important ways. First, we focus on strategies and answers, not just answers. Getting the right answer is important, but so is thinking quickly and efficiently. Our strategies lay the groundwork for higher math - and also get the answers right. Second, our games are full of math - not something else. While other games give kids non-math incentives to play more, our games reward kids for doing math . . . with more math. Imagine, kids being so challenged and engaged that they want to do more math problems!
