On the topic of puzzles, my puzzle in in the NYTimes Numberplay column this week. It’s built to look hard, but come apart easily if you attack it from the right direction. The Rearrangement Puzzle The number 1, 525, 354, 555, 657, 585, [...]
This week’s Sunday puzzle on NPR is a classic from Sam Loyd. Here’s Will Shortz: This is one of the “lost” puzzles of Sam Loyd, the great American puzzlemaker from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s from an old magazine with [...]
A colleague of mine once remarked how strange it is that while the Greeks talked about 6-cornered shapes and 4-sided shapes, we talk about hexagons and quadrilaterals. Why is it, [...]
We’ve argued for a long time that the real experience of mathematics is inextricably tied to play. But if you’re a parent or teacher, you’ve seen kids play in [...]
Back in 2006, I had the chance to see Jonathan Kozol when he visited Seattle touring his new book, The Shame of the Nation. The country, he said, had more educational racial [...]
We’re just finishing up a massive project of creating a supplementary curriculum for Seattle’s Summer School program. We realized that the spirit of the lessons was even more important than the content. To this end, we designed the [...]
From the May 18 New Yorker article World Without End, by Raffi Khatchadourian:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that kids need to move around, and creating opportunities to move during math class can pay off in spades. Therefore, we have a collection of some of our favorite math/movement quick activities to [...]
I just rewrote our write up of Counting Collections, and reclassified it on our Lessons page as a Foundational Activity. The reclassification was motivated in part by a [...]
I almost missed the Cheryl’s Birthday Party internet phenomenon this week. An awkwardly written logic problem went viral, and the internet was abuzz with attempts to solve it. [...]
I recently wrote a piece for the New York Times Numberplay blog on what we do to help people fall in love with math. I thought I’d include it here. No matter whom we work with, our initial goal is for them to have an authentic, [...]
Recently, in an art gallery in Ballard, I saw the amazing painting above. (Check out the artist’s website here.) I love this kind of mathematical art–the tessellation in [...]
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