Shelburne Farms Mini Maker Faire

I went to the Maker Faire at Shelburne Farms today for the first time.

This is what I did.

I made a magic wand with an LED light that turns on and off by touching a wire to a battery on the wand. I first had to figure out how to connect the LED to some wires, then run them to the battery correctly. After that part was working, I added sparkly silver ribbon to the stem of the wand and encased the LED light in crumply clear plastic tape for light refraction purposes. Voila! I am ready to put spells on people. Joanna Elliott, Flynn Elementary parent and teacher, was the wizard behind this project. See her fabulous art blog.

I made a puzzle book, a square flexagon (a previously unknown-to-me relative of the hexaflexagon) for comic-book type story-telling, and a mini book that could contain anything from math facts to the secrets of the universe. A matchbook size mini book can be made and then kept in an actual matchbox. Book Arts Guild of Vermont people helped me do this. Students might want to make these after reading the Red Clover Book entitled The Matchbox Diary by Paul Fleischman. This is an activity for any budget.

I spoke with Richa, who is going to assist with a course called Intro to Relational Databases at Girl Develop It Burlington. There are classes and meet-ups. I want to go.

Champlain College Emergent Media Center folks explained what they are working on. Their new Maker Lab that had its grand opening party last night.

I saw a robot-building challenge and presentation by Joe Chase and his team of students from Essex High School. Joe is my neighbor and it was great to see him up there advocating for more design and engineering work in schools. My daughter took his robotics class a few years ago and loved it.

I saw and did many other cool things, including experimenting with magnets with Frank White from CreateItLab and speaking with the effervescent Michael Metz of Generator, Lucy deLaBruere, Courtney Asaro, and Graham Clarke, both of Flynn Elementary School in Burlington.

What a great day! Takeaways included an Arduino Robot Kit made by YourDuino.com and the knowledge that so many people are working on creating engaging opportunities for people of all ages in the Burlington area.

Latest and Greatest in a Nutshell

Dan Meyer

There are some very good things happening right now in the world of mathematics education. Being at the NCSM Conference gave me the opportunity to connect with many of the greatest minds in the field and hear about their current projects.

Here are my top picks for books to buy, courses to take, blogs to read...right NOW.

Books

NCTM’s Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. The book Steve Leinwand keeps waving around. I read a draft in the fall. Educators need to start turning to this when figuring out how to do professional development, how to craft school goals, what to look for in classrooms. It’s radical.

Visible Learning by John Hattie. This book is being enthusiastically talked about by greats like Tim Kanold and Bob Laird. Subtitled “A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement”, it’s the new go-to resource for knowing what truly works in education.

Smarter Together: Collaboration and Equity in the Elementary Math Classroom by Featherstone, et al.

Blogs

Tim Kanold. Check out his most recent post about math homework.

Max Ray. I went to an excellent workshop for teachers by Max and also saw his engaging Ignite talk. He’s with the Math Forum @ Drexel. There are problems, videos and more.

Dan Meyer. Prolific blogger, thinker. Recently published Great Modeling Tasks in Three Acts (for NCSM members only, except for one freebie).

Annie Fetter. At Math Forum with Max. Great Ignite talk about her artist mother and the math she used.

YouCubed. Not a blog but go there and sign up for updates. Watch some of the videos.

Courses

There are two online Stanford courses taught by Jo Boaler that are a must-do. Last summer, I took How to Learn Math for Parents and Teachers. It was fabulous. It was free then, now it costs $125. Worth it.

This year, Jo Boaler has added a brand new course called How to Learn Math for Students. It’s free. I haven’t taken it yet but I recommend trying it with a young person you know. It sounds like it is appropriate for children ages 10-18, but for children younger than 13, a parent or teacher should register and share the material with the child. Go to the site and register. It begins in May.

People to Follow on Twitter

@jgough, @steve_leinwand , @SkipFennell, @maxmathforum, @tkanold, @MFAnnie, @TuvaLabs,@Trianglemancsd, @wahedahbug, @lambchop1998 (I met this guy at NSTA Boston, but he was great), @IllustrateMath, @joboaler

Who I missed

Uri Treisman. But here’s the audio of his talk.

Stanford University: How to Learn Math

Image from Geometry Daily.

I can’t say enough about how fantastic Jo Boaler’s online math class was. I finished it yesterday.

Jo is a Stanford University professor, and she created a free, online class for teachers and parents called How to Learn Math. Students (there were approximately 35,000 people registered) watched videos, wrote responses to prompts, and completed other tasks at their own pace. Some are still finishing; the course ends September 28.

Jo is working on a course for young people now. She has published a book called What’s Math Got To Do With It. I’m convinced that whatever Jo does in the future, it will be great. Keep an eye on her.

In a nutshell, Jo is all about dispelling myths about who is good at math and who isn’t, evangelizing about the growth mindset work of Carol Dweck, and giving teachers ideas about effective math education. She advocates for math as an inquiry activity, and really seeing it in a totally different way than most of us were taught in school and continue to teach today.

In Jo’s words:

Mathematics classrooms should be places where students believe:

• Everyone can do well in math.
• Mathematics problems can be solved with many different insights and methods.
• Mistakes are valuable, they encourage brain growth and learning.
• Mathematics will help them in their lives, not because they will see the same types of problems in the real world but because they are learning to think quantitatively and abstractly and developing an inquiry relationship with math.

Fact Fluency

What is it about fact fluency that is so challenging for some students? It’s not uncommon for students to lack automaticity with their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts into middle school and beyond. Struggles with fact fluency sometimes accompany low achievement in math, but that is not always the case. Sometimes struggling math students know their facts. Sometimes high-achieving students do not know their facts.

I am reading John Tapper’s excellent new book entitled Solving for Why: Understanding, Assessing, and Teaching Students Who Struggle with Math.  Tapper devotes a section of the book to students who face challenges in short term, long term and working memory. He weighs in on the fact fluency question there.

What students need to understand are underlying mathematics concepts. Multiplicative and proportional reasoning are, for example, critical to moving on from elementary mathematics. Fact retrieval certainly facilitates learning in these areas, but the inability to retrieve facts will not prevent students from reasoning at higher levels. Knowing math facts is important, but fact retrieval is to mathematics what spelling is to literacy: we want students to be proficient at the skill, but the skill is a small part of the overall picture. If a student is able to spell but cannot write a coherent essay, the spelling does them little good. The same is true with math facts. (p. 138)

This is interesting for students, parents, and teachers to ponder. Try spending ten minutes a day or less studying math facts. Learn them in a way that reinforces conceptual understanding and is fun. Enjoy higher level, rich mathematics. Like the Fibonacci spiraling Hurricane Sandy picture above.

What's Math Got to Do with It?

A man is on a diet and goes into a shop to buy some ham slices. He is given 3 slices which together weight ⅓ of a pound, but his diet says that he is only allowed to eat ¼ of a pound. How much of the 3 slices he bought can he eat while staying true to his diet?

There is a lovely book in the John J. Flynn Parent Resource Center these days. It’s called What’s Math Got to Do with It? How parents and teachers can help children learn to love their least favorite subject, by Jo Boaler. The book was published in 2009, but I have only recently discovered it.

Boaler includes many more problem-solvers like the one above. Don’t worry if you don’t know a formula to figure out how many turkey slices the man can eat. Start drawing pictures and think about what a whole pound would look like. Go slow and use your intuition. Says Boaler, “Children begin school as natural problem solvers and many studies have shown that students are better at solving problems before they attend math classes.”

…People don’t like mathematics because of the way it is misrepresented in school. The math that millions of Americans experience in school is an impoverished version of the subject and it bears little resemblance to the mathematics of life or work or even the mathematics in which mathematicians engage.

In addition to the prompt I shared in my last post “What do you think you should try next?”, Boaler shares more good prompts to use with children:

• How did you think about the problem?
• What was the first step?
• What did you do next?
• Why did you do it that way?
• Can you think of a different way to do the problem?
• How do the two ways relate?
• What could you change about the problem to make it easier or simpler?

Enjoy.

Mindset

Charles Coiner, 1961, from Smithsonian American Art Museum

I am a huge fan of Carol Dweck’s work on people’s beliefs about the nature of intelligence. A student’s mindset has a measurable impact on his or her success in math, among other things.

We praised the children in one group for their intelligence, telling them, “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We praised the children in the other group for their effort: “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” That’s all we did, but the results were dramatic.

Doesn’t that statement make you want to read more? Here is a condensed version of Dweck’s research (you can read the book, Mindset, and find more articles here).

And here is a student-friendly version of the article. Perfect non-fiction reading for fourth and fifth graders!

Sugar and Ice book review

Phia Smith, a fourth grade mathematician at John J. Flynn Elementary School, read the book, “Sugar and Ice” by Kate Messner. Our school librarian told us it had some math in the story, including Fibonacci numbers. Phia and I had been learning about Fibonacci numbers together, so it seemed like a perfect book for her to read. She gave me permission to publish her book review here.

Sugar and Ice is a story about a girl named Claire. Claire is a skater and a mathematician at heart. She has a skating coach named Mary Pat. Skating on a cow pond she entered a skating competition and was so good she got offered a scholarship to a really nice skating group by Andrei Grosheva. With some troubles along the way she comes to a decision of what dream to follow. Read the book to find out.

I think it is a very good book. I enjoyed the bits of Fibonacci and math in it. I think it deserves 4 ½ stars. - Phia