Making Your Own Sense
Reflections on maths, learning, and the Maths Learning Centre.
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The shoemaker and Dobby
Do you know the story of the Shoemaker and the Elves? Well, I've known it since I was very young. It's a Brothers Grimm, and it goes something like this:
Pi, Tau and Eta
Recently, I've heard a lot about the number Ï„, and I find the whole thing a bit odd.
Rule collision
The same experience has happened to me several times in the Maths Drop-In Centre recently – with different students from different courses – and it was such a strong pattern I need to talk about it.
The students are doing some algebra involving negative powers on the tops of fractions. Something like this:
Rapunzel's Epiphany
We bought Disney Studio's newest film "Tangled" on the weekend and I have to say it's one of my favourite movies ever. It's certainly Disney's best movie since "Beauty and the Beast", and I dearly loved "Beauty and the Beast". I should warn you now that in order to say what I want to say I'm going to have to reveal a bit of the plot, so let this count as your spoiler alert.
Not quite the bisection method
In various first year maths courses here, the students learn the "bisection method" for finding zeros of continuous functions. (A zero of a function is a number that makes the answer of the function come out to zero – it's therefore also a point where the graph of the function crosses the x-axis.) It's based on the Intermediate Value Theorem, which basically says that if the function is below zero at one spot and above zero at another, then is must be equal to zero somewhere in between. Here's how the process goes:
Discounting your problem-solving
As I was leaving the other day, a student said that she would come to see us the next day to ask some questions about her assignment. She said she had tried to do as much of it herself as she could, and had only done 70% of it.
Frayed research
Phew! I submitted our article for the MERGA conference last week and now I feel like I've come out of hibernation: I'm standing blinking in the sunlight wondering what happened to everything I was doing before I started work on the article. (One of those things was this blog, which is why I've been quieter than usual lately.)
Only one chance
We've been running Drop-In Centre tutor training recently, and as part of the training we discussed the statistics on how students use the Centre. The focus of this post is the following graph:
Charlotte's Sudoku
The other night I was doing a Sudoku, and my two-year-old daughter Charlotte decided she wanted to help, as she always does at any time when I have a pen and paper she could steal.
The Fairyland Clickety-Clock
This post is again inspired by the television show The Fairies (you have been warned!).
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