Math Teachers at Play - November Blog Carnival

This is the first time I ever hosted a blog carnival so please bear with me.

While reading the posts submitted to this month's Math Teachers at Play blog carnival, I was struck by how visualization is very important in teaching math, and just math in general. I was happy to read all the "visualization" posts since my recent interest is exactly in visual representations and how they help in learning, especially learning math.

For instance, Alexander Bogomolny gives us a very intriguing geometric / visualization puzzle:Wrapping a Cube posted at CTK Insights. I love all sorts of puzzles, and this was no exception. First I didn't read the instructions properly, so I found a solution by bending not on the lines. But then, after rereading the instructions, I was stuck for a while... Have a go and try to solve it!

Guillermo P. Bautista Jr. shows us how to visually represent multiplication of fractions:Multiplication of Fractions Mathematics and Multimedia posted at Mathematics and Multimedia. I really like this one... easy to follow logic and great diagrams. I'll keep this up my sleeve when I have to teach fraction multiplication.

Another great visualization post was on how to visually represent binomial multiplication by Climbing Gecko: Visualizing (a+b)² posted at Intellectual Ramblings. It just goes to show you that great things come from: 1. linking visualizations and math, 2. playing around with toys.

Erlina Ronda presents » The Counting Principle, Pascal’s Triangle, and Powers of 2 » Mathematics for Teaching posted at Mathematics for Teaching. This is a great lesson plan combining Pascal's triangle, combinations, and permutations, along with many visualizations on how to solve this puzzle/problem.

And what's a visualization math segment without geometry: Mags gives a comprehensive review of geometry with many diagrams and videos Ms. D's Chapter 1 - Geometry Foundation posted at Ms D Geometry. Very complete and well done!

A few of the submitted posts don't fall under the visualization heading, but are also very interesting and worth a look:

Jason Dryer investigates a common yet interesting student error while adding polynomials:Focus on fixing bugs rather than overwriting procedures posted at The Number Warrior. I agree with Jason in that understanding what the student misunderstood and "debugging" their misconception is way more effective than reteaching the material. By understanding student thinking we become better math teachers, as we can personalize the teaching... otherwise the student might as well learn from a textbook!

IMACS touched upon a very important topic in education: Learning to Fail Well posted at IMACS Blog. Students often need to fail in order to learn. Making mistakes is very much part of the learning process. I was very impressed with this blog post, and I suggest any parent to read it and be inspired.

William Dvorak introduces us to Project Euler, then shows a very inventive way of solving one of the problems from this website (problem #67):Project Euler and a Divide and Conquer Algorithm | Deterministic Programming posted at Deterministic Programming. This post takes me back to university, when I actually new a lot of math. I remember I had to do sorting algorithms (although I don't remember the divide and conquer one)... not so much now - how much I already forgot :(

I hope you'll have as much fun as I had in reading all these great posts. Until next time...