Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Google adds graphing calculator to its search results

Google just announced graphing support to its search engine.

More information at the Google Search Blog.

Hat tip to my brother Abe.

Conrad Wolfram on teaching Math

Here's a recent interview in Madrid with Conrad Wolfram titled: The right way to teach math.

What do you think?

Wolfram founded ComputerBasedMath.org to change how Math is taught:

How do we fix math education? The importance of math to jobs, society, and thinking has exploded over the last few decades. Meanwhile, math education has gotten stuck or has even slipped backward. Why has this chasm opened up? It's all about computers: when they do the calculating, people can work on harder questions, try more concepts, and play with a multitude of new ideas.

computerbasedmath.org is a project to build a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart—alongside a campaign to refocus math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward relevant and conceptually interesting topics.

Conrad Wolfram also presented a TED Global 2010 talk.

Avoiding the “Summer Math Slide”: tips from TI

Texas Instruments has produced a good article on how to keep kids engaged in Math over the summer break.

Help Your Teen Avoid the “Summer Math Slide”
Students Lose as Much as Two Months of Learning over the Summer

DALLAS (June 8, 2011) – Learning math is a lot like learning a sport; you have to practice to improve your skills. If you take three months off, you will get rusty. Students, especially teenagers, want a summer packed with fun, and typically academics aren’t on the list of to-dos for the summer break. But there are things every student can do over the summer (and yes, they can be fun) to prevent losing the days and days of hard work they’ve already put into math during the school year.

According to the National Association for Summer Learning, across the board, all kids lose some math skills over the summer. On average, students lose approximately two months of grade-level math skills in the summer months if they do not participate in educational activities. Additional research, provided on the National Association for Summer Learning website, states losses in math are somewhat greater than those in reading, and teachers often spend four to six weeks re-teaching material. Time lost becomes crucial as students enter more demanding math classes in middle and high school.

But teenagers, with the help of their parents, can prevent the summer math slide.

“Students do not have to lose the math skills they developed during the school year,” says Tom Reardon, a math adviser for Texas Instruments and a retired math teacher with 35 years of experience in the classroom. “Summer is the perfect time for teenagers to focus on tuning up skills, and it can be done in some fun and engaging ways.”

Three high school courses via MIT OpenCourseWare

If you've not discovered MIT's courses for high school students you owe yourself a look. There are courses in Math, science, and humanities, all available for free via the web, with course notes and homework assignments included. These courses are a small fraction of the more than 2,000 MIT OpenCourseWare classes.

• Highlights of Calculus with Gilbert Strang
• Probability: Random Isn't So Random
• Combinatorics: The Fine Art of Counting

Tonight: Calculus By and For Young People

Sorry for the late notice. I just got back from vacation. The event will be recorded for future viewing.

Calculus By and For Young People

The free webinar is part of Maria Droujkova's Math 2.0 Interest Group series.

During the event, Don Cohen-The Mathman will have participants graphing things they have never done before and understand what graphing an equation or function means. He will show how to use his latest creation- A Map to Calculus, originally just a poster, but with the help of a former student Jonathan Storm, is now clickable! Each spot on the Map links to his student's work and sample problems from his books. We can also ask Don questions about his past and present work with students ages four and up, his books, and his books that were translated into Japanese and sold in Japan.

Donald Cohen has been teaching math for 56 years. He has taught in Junior HS, college, worked with Dr. Robert B. Davis for about 15 years with The Madison Project training teachers, and developed student lessons on PLATO, a computer-based program at the U of Illinois. He co-founded and taught in The Math Program, a private program, tutoring children since 1976.

More information is here.

‘Dismantling the calculus pyramid’ gets ton of views

A couple of days ago I posted a very brief article, Dismantling the calculus pyramid. The post has been seen 2,746 times, thanks mostly to being noticed by 'timwiseman' who posted a link to the article at Y Combinator Hacker News. The posting at Y Combinator has gotten 45 comments while, here, it's gotten four comments. The conversation at Y Combinator is quite lively. Check it out.