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Replacing
I have had many people say to me over the years, "But algebra is easy: just tell them to do the same thing to both sides!" This is wrong in several ways, not least of which is the word "easy". The particular way it's wrong that I want to talk about today is the idea that doing the same thing to both sides is somehow the only move in algebra, because it's not even the most important or the most common move.
Questions with a morally wrong answer
I think asking students questions is an important part of my job of helping students succeed. Good questions can help me see where they are in their journey so I can choose how to guide them to the next step, or can help to make clear the skills they already have that will help them figure things out for themselves. But there is a class of questions that shuts all of this down immediately. Here are some examples:
Changing the goal of the Numbers game
I conscripted the game Numbers and Letters seven years ago to help promote the Maths Learning Centre and the Writing Centre at university events like O'Week and Open Day. Ever since then, it has always bothered me how free and easy participation in the Letters game is, while the Numbers game is much less so. This Open Day I had a remarkable idea: instead of stating in the rules that the goal is to achieve the target, and trying to encourage people to take a different approach, what if I just聽changed the stated goal!聽I don't know why I didn't think of it before, to be honest!
Number Neighbourhoods
This blog post is about a game I invented in February 2020, the third in a suite of Battleships-style games. (The previous two are Which Number Where and Digit Disguises.)
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