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Home in One Piece: a game of strategy using play dough
This post is about a game I invented called Home in One Piece.
[Read more about Home in One Piece: a game of strategy using play dough]
Three hours in the MLC Drop-In Centre
Last week, I had one of those days in the MLC Drop-In Centre where I was hyper-aware of what I was doing as I was talking with students and by the end I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things I had thought about. I decided that today I might attempt to process (or at least list) some of it for posterity.
Likeable primes
There is a Twitter account that tweets the prime numbers once an hour in sequence. (The handle is @_primes_.) Since before I joined Twitter, it's been working its way through the six-digit primes and some of them are very nice. A lot of other people think they're nice too, based on the fact that they are given likes and retweets. But what is it that motivates people to do this? What is it that makes a prime likeable? Well, that's what this post is about.
Book Reading: Choice Words
This post is about my reaction to the book "Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children's Learning" by Peter H. Jonston.
TMC17 Diary
Well I did it. I went to Twitter Math Camp 2017 (TMC17) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
65536
I have a whole suite of maths t-shirts that I made myself. One of them simply has the number 65536 on it. It's been getting a bit of attention over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I might write about it.
Bodyscale Prime Climb
Prime Climb is a wonderful game by Dan Finkel (aka @MathforLove), which you can find out more about here. The board is a path made of the numbers from 0 to 101, coloured by an ingenous and beautiful system.
The Arts student's maths brain
Yesterday I talked about one of the common responses to people finding out I am a mathematician/maths teacher, that of saying, "I'm not a maths person." The other common response I get is, "I don't have a maths brain." (John Rowe mentioned this in his comment on the previous post.)
Actually, I am a maths person
I am a mathematician and a maths teacher. Therefore it is an occupational hazard that any random person who finds out what my job is will respond with "I'm not a maths person." The most frustrating people are my own students who I am trying to tell that my actual job is to help them learn maths. I used to tell them that there was no such thing as a "maths person", but I have recently come to the conclusion that this is a lie. There is definitely such a thing as a maths person because I am a maths person.
Childhood memories
Two books I've read recently have encouraged me to investigate my memories from childhood. In Tracy Zager's "Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You'd Had", she urged me to think about my maths autobiography to see what influenced my current feelings about maths. In Stuart Brown's "Play", he urged me to think about my play history to see what influenced my current feelings and tendencies about play. In the spirit of those two, here are some of my earliest memories about maths and play.
