Magnetic Blocks

Here's another favorite magnetic puzzle, or play thing. It has that great "pop into place" feel as the pieces go together. There are 24 identical pieces that make a cube and plenty of other interesting shapes. Fooling around with it gives people mathematical insights, and under a teacher's guidance with a little questioning it can be turned into a great lesson in area, perimeter, and volume, angles and more. But for the most part it's just fun. It's called Mag-Blocks.

PhysLink the Science eStore carry's the 24 piece set ($14.99). This looks like a great place to get interesting learning things for home or classroom.

Discount School Supply offers a double 48 piece set $21.95 - that's two cubes. What a deal! Check it out! Whoa! As of 10/2/07 the 48 piece set was on sale for $17.95 - that's a really good deal. However the colors changed and it's hard to tell if the pieces are the same size. But I'm gettin' one now.

Math Book Helps Girls Embrace Their Inner Mathematician

Here's a good one from Wired Magazine, back in August of this year.

"The actress who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar, is a self-proclaimed math advocate for girls who might otherwise shy away from a subject that Barbie once famously described as 'hard.'

McKellar's math book for junior high girls, called Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math and not Break a Nail, will be out Thursday. It has the look and feel of a teen magazine, but puts heavy emphasis on fractions and pre-algebra."

It's great to see celebs encouraging girls in math. The Expanding Your Horizon's conferences have been doing it for 30 years, but this will surely help the message go mainstream in a bigger way.

A Whole School Turns Math into Magic

Here's a very inspiring video from the George Lucas Education Foundation, www.glef.org showing how Fullerton IV Elementary School in Oregon made math the highlight of their program. It takes significant professional development to create this kind of math culture, but just imagine the payoff for the students, the teachers, and the school. Their test scores soared, but more importantly, math became the favored subject of nearly all the students.

Bagels, Pico, Fermi - Mastermind with Digits

There's a great logic game that's like Mastermind with numbers. You guess a three digit number and you get clues as to whether you got any of the digits correct and whether you got them in the correct place. When you make guesses, you get a clue. The clues are:

• Bagels means a digit you guessed is not in the number,
  
• Pico means a digit is correct but in the wrong position
  
• Fermi means a digit is correct in the correct position

For instance suppose you guess is 457 and get the clue Fermi Bagels Bagels. It means one digit is in the correct place and two are not in the number at all. But you don't know which digit the clues apply to.

You can play it on paper or a blackboard with kids. Here are the instructions.

Or you can play it online. There are no instructions on this page and you enter your guesses via pull downs, but it works fine. (When it gives you the clues it just lists the Fermis first, then the Picos, then the Bagels - it doesn't give a clue as to which digit each refers to.)

And a tidbit on the name from the instruction page. I always find these connections interesting.

"We don't know the official origin of the name of this game. Bagels are shaped like zeros and indicate that there are no correct digits. Pico (peek-oh), from the Spanish meaning 'beak' or 'peak,' is used in science as a prefix meaning one-trillionth. For example, 1 picometer = 10-12 meter. who later moved to the United States. Enrico Fermi (fair-mee), 1901-1954, was an Italian-born atomic physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in 1938."

Concrete or Abstract Manipulatives

I was talking about "virtual manipulatives" with teachers from Willow Creek Academy and some of them brought up the fact that younger students really need the concrete experience with real objects. I certainly agree since there's nothing like "hands on" experiences. But the digital versions of traditional manipulatives, like these online pattern blocks, are still great for those who are moving from concrete to abstract, and for children who might like to play online at home with parents when the real thing isn't available. It's also the case that online you can change the color of the blocks, you can have as many blocks as you like - no shortage, and you don't have to worry about bumping your pattern and messing it up. Plus students can grab a screen, put the design in a word processor and write about it, which is a wonderful way to get students to articulate ideas about patterns and other mathematical relationships.

For those who want the real thing you can find nice wooden pattern blocks online, or even Giant foam pattern blocks for the floor from Learning Resources

Math Wonders with Seven Pieces

Now that I've posted about Tangrams I find myself pondering why they're so amazing. Just think, seven simple pieces that hold a myriad of geometric relationships such that they can be combined to create all the shapes above. And they're not easy. Just give it a try. Tangrams

Or better yet, sit with a young person and work on it together. Talk about what your brain is thinking as you try to use the seven pieces to make the different shapes. You could ask questions like: Which of the shapes has the greatest perimeter? Which shape has the greatest area? How could you design a shape with the pieces that has the maximum perimeter, or the maximum area?