Playing with Math: Can you write a review?

Playing with Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers is on Amazon now! But we don't yet have any reviews. If you've gotten a copy of the book, can you write a review on Amazon? We would be so grateful.

Warmly,
Sue

Links on Friday

• What is the Golden Ratio? A boy thought a museum had it wrong, and got in the news for correcting them. Really, they used the less common version of the ratio, still right. Read about it at Sense Made Here.
• Jonathan Halabi blogged about how crazy the scores on the NY common core math tests are. I wonder how other states report scores.
• I've been wondering whether I can use the principles of storytelling to improve my teaching. 
• I wonder if I can modify any of these math movement games for kids, so they'd work well with adults students.
• How can we shift math education from memorizing to problem solving? How can we help students learn problem solving? (NY Times article)
• I've figured this out before, and the answer is even somewhere on my blog maybe. But I am once again stuck. Flipping coins to one side without looking... (on a Math Riddles blog)

I'll be leading a Math Jam for eight days just before Fall semester starts, helping students prepare to succeed in Beginning Algebra. My eight topics:

1. Number Sense
2. Fractions
3. Negatives
4. Algebra
5. Percents
6. Graphing 
7. Slopes
8. Problem-Solving  

For fractions, I plan to do a bit with Egyptian Fractions. Here's a site that looks good for that. I looked at the Beast Academy site to see if they had anything good. I found 5 things I liked: one game and two puzzles using the area meaning of multiplication, one puzzle on ordering of decimals,  and one game like Taboo for communicating about shapes.

Playing with Math: Inspiring Online Conversations

First sighting of a comment on a mathematical blog post that was inspired by seeing the content in my book...



Jonathan Halabi writes jd2718. His post, Puzzle: Who am I?, became one of the puzzles in Playing with Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers.



Today Lara H replied to his post:

I came across this puzzle in the book “Playing with Math.” I found a different solution based on a wrong assumption I made at the beginning of solving the puzzle. I was thinking that a number with 3 digits also has 2 digits so I made both of those statements true and came up with 4097, which works for all the other conditions.

I responded with:

I’d say ‘different interpretation’ instead of ‘wrong assumption’. I wonder how many solutions the puzzle has using your interpretation. (Pretty exciting to see my book has inspired new discussion on Jonathan’s blog post!)

We are hoping that the book will inspire online conversations. This is the first drop of what we hope will eventually become a deluge.