Math Teachers at Play 38

Welcome to the May 20, 2011 edition of Math Teachers at Play. Before beginning the carnival, let us have some interesting facts about 38.

  • The sum of the squares first three primes
  • The number of years it took the Israelites to travel from Kadesh Barnea to the Zered valley in Deuteronomy
  • There number of surviving plays written by William Shakespeare
  • The atomic number of strontium
  • Thirty seven and 38 are the first pair of consecutive positive integers not divisible by any of their digits.
Now, let the carnival begin!

ARITHMETIC AND EARLY LEARNING

Susan Carpenter has an excellent way to introduce algebraic thinking to kids; that is, to search for patterns in her blog  Our Classroom Blog: One More Math Post posted at Our Classroom Blog. I really like this one. It’s highly recommended for teachers.

Nordin Zuber has powerful and fun way to explore the index rules that can be used for middle school students  in Take a piece of paper …. posted at Exzuberant.

Tower Three Eight

John Golden introduces a super hero themed game to introduce exponents in Power Up posted at Math Hombre.

Caroline Mukisa  features the results of the Maths Insider Times Tables survey in This is What You Told Me About Learning the Times Tables posted at Maths Insider.

John Cook presents Jupiter’s magic square, seen at Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I, posted at The Endeavour.

ALGEBRA AND GEOMETRY

Denise, the organizer of Math Teachers at Play, takes us back to Euclid’s time

No 38 - graffitiexplaining how the Greeks avoided numbers after \sqrt{2} was discovered in  Euclid’s Geometric Algebra « Let’s Play Math! posted at Let’s Play Math!

vmathtutor revisits Biquadratic equation posted at Virtual Math Tutor.

ADVANCED MATH

Margot Keyes presents an excellent video that depicts the relative scale of the universe in factors of 10 in Powers of Ten posted at Learning Beyond The Book.

ABOUT TEACHING MATH

Stephen Peacock presents Hula Hoops, String, Circles and pi posted at peacockmaths an excellent way to teaching circles.

Jennifer presents another way to teach multiplication in Multiplication Array Cards posted at Toad Haven Homeschool.

Fëanor has a fun and interesting way to teach children prime numbers at Teaching Prime Numbers to Children posted at Math Blog.
38
Glen Creswell presents his experiences in homeschooling and teaching kids mathematics in Understanding Math posted at Parentella. If the parents is as good as Glen in teaching math, then he can definitely home school.

I quite agree with John Cook that calculators are (a bit) obsolete in his article  Slide rules posted at The Endeavour.

PUZZLES

Dan presents Squares of Differences: subtraction practice toward a greater purposeposted at math for love, saying, “Squares of differences are a great puzzle, a motivator of arithmetic practice, and a springboard to some very deep, elegant ideas in mathematics.”
No 38 - broken plastic
Sol Lederman has new blog with simple examples of Mathematica code, well explained, and in the context of neat projects. Check out his Monte Carlo bell curve posted at Playing With Mathematica.

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That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Math Teachers at Play using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Photo Credits: Wikipedia (first photo), Flickr (all photos, click photo to go to original link)

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