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Mental-jaunt #1 (Feb 14, 2013)

To students (of all ages):

**jaunt (noun)**
a short excursion or journey for pleasure

**mental-jaunt (noun)**
a short mental excursion or mental journey for pleasure, nothing too heavy!

Have a go at mental-jaunt #1 – a wee journey with numbers.

Optimisation (ClassPad)

When studying quadratic functions/calculus, do too many of your students find ‘optimisation questions’ hard? Have you ever wondered why? The booklet you can download here is the unit of work that supports the ideas presented in a number of workshops during 2011 and 2012 that outlined why students find the ideas hard. Basically, traditional teaching-and-doing approaches fail to focus on what is really happening: the measurement on one dimension and the subsequent calculation of other dimensions. Also, algebraic simplification turns out to be the devil – the patterns in the symbols are lost and so generalisation is not ‘seen’! The approach in the booklet supports the idea of each student developing a calculation and then comparing and contrasting to it other’s calculations – it is in this that the symbolic patterns appear and the generalisation literally reveals itself.

Generosity – an approach to fractions and percentages.

This unit uses the context of generosity to introduce a need to have a fractional way of thinking about something.

It develops a way of thinking about fractions – the for-every idea – that is the elusive multiplicative model.

Developed over about 5 years, this approach has been tried and seems to work. 🙂

Mental-jaunt #2 (February 4, 2014)

jaunt (noun) a short excursion or journey for pleasure mental-jaunt (noun) a short mental excursion or mental journey for pleasure, nothing too heavy! Mental-jaunts are trails that will evoke certain ways of thinking that are very helpful both in understanding more complex …

Developing ways-of-thinking about the ideas that form calculus

This video and documents outline a 4 session course that aim to assist students to develop the optimal ways-of-thinking about the ideas that underpin calculus.

Cup Snakes – Describing Linear Change

A video introduction presents the mathematics of cup snakes, a hands on phenomena involving additive change that gives rise to a way to think about linear growth. Modeling this phenomena theoretically, with the help of two cups, and through data, with the help of many, many cups, these videos give rise to some of the big ideas around developing and using linear algebraic models to describe additive bi-variate change. These ideas are then unpacked in the accompanying ‘chapter replacement’ booklet.

Logarithms – when adding is multiplying (9860)

This unit aims to provide a simple/useful way to thing about logarithms when first meting them.
We use two examples of “hard” to graph data (due to the extreme range in the values) to alert students to the idea of thinking about a number as its power, as opposed to its absolute value.
The rest of the unit aims to establish a way to think about calculating with logarithms that will set a sound foundation for later on and that builds on their knowledge of ‘indices’ from previous years.

Exponential and trigonometric functions

A selection of documents that share some nice ideas about exponential functions, trigonometric functions and a lovely context where both concepts come together.

Describing change (9860)

This replacement unit introduces algebraic models (linear and simple exponential) to describe change in the world around us. The fitting of models to bivariate data is approached via the underlying properties of constant additive or multiplicative change. The unit contains a wealth of data drawn from a range of aspects of the modern world. Extensive notes are provided on the use of 9860 technology. All of unit’s data is provided it g1m files, ready for file transfer.

The wind in your sails (9860)

This is a replacement unit to facilitate the teaching and learning of right-angle triangle trigonometry. The students begin by ‘learning’ how to sail a boat and then engage with various aspects of sailing and as a result learn about the fundamental trigonometric ratios. The unit comes with pre-made 9860 Geometry files that enable the students to sail virtual boats, collect data on their sailing and through this learn about trigonometric ratios. The unit includes traditional learning and problems as well as some not so traditional learning.