One of the important aims of our evening functions that we hold at the Open Innovation Studio (OIS) is to inspire teachers and open their eyes to new resources and ideas that can be brought into the classroom. This was no different at last night’s function, which had a strong turnout and good representation from a number of Cape Town schools. Maths is somewhat different to other subjects, as there are many opinions about how and why maths must be taught in a certain way, the importance of not missing out any steps when practising maths, and the fact that maths as a subject worldwide could do with a major revamp.

There were some familiar faces last night, as well as a number of new teachers that arrived. Mark did a recap of who he is and the projects that we run, which served as a reminder for those that had heard part of it before, and an introduction for those that were new (have a look at his blog for more information). Mark mentioned some great tools that can be used in or outside the classroom, which have been touched on before for other subjects – Khan Academy videos and PhET Simulations. The Khan Academy has a great feature on their website – a knowledge map – which enables you to assess through completing exercises in each module, where your knowledge gaps in maths are. We think this is a pretty neat feature and encourage you to check it out.

Mark briefly introduced a blog by Dan Meyer and then showed the video of him speaking at TED Talks, followed by a video of Conrad Wolfram who also spoke at TED. As a note, we do not take TED Talks as gospel, but merely show them as a point of discussion and to offer different opinions on subjects. Both of these videos received different reactions from our audience of teachers, but both also had different messages about maths teaching (similar in that they believe how maths is taught needs to change, but different ideas as to how one should go about this).

Dan Meyer is an innovative teacher who uses everyday examples and concepts in his maths classroom. His slogan is “be less helpful”. He likes to present his class with maths problems that have all the steps removed and have as little information as possible, so that through engaging with his learners and allowing the whole class irrespective of their maths aptitude to get involved in the discussion, he reduces the problem to a level of every day intuition so that everyone can participate. He teaches maths in a completely different way to traditional maths teachers, and believes in creating conversation and engaging with his learners and the subject matter as much as possible. He says that too often maths questions are constructed around a formula, so once learners know how to find the formula (and sometimes the word problems refer them to previous example exercises which literally spell out the formula), they don’t actually have to think. Dan is trying to change this and is an inspiration to many teachers.

Conrad Wolfram of Wolfram Research has a strong belief that doing calculations by hand is a waste of brain power, and that we should be letting computers do that part of maths for us. He says there are four steps to solving real world problems: 1. We have to pose the right question; 2. turn a real world problem into a maths problem; 3. computation – turn a maths question into a maths answer; 4. turn the maths formulation back into real world application and decide if it answered your question. Wolfram believes that computers can solve step 3 better than people can, and that we should be having our learners do steps 1, 2 and 4, which are all about conceptualising and applying the maths. We have to look at how relevant it is for learners to do step 3, how much real purpose is there in that step? He does believe that sometimes it is necessary to know each step and be able to do it by hand, but not to the extent that curricula generally advocate.

Problems in the real world are much harder and more complicated than the problems given in maths class. It is a huge problem to teach “dumbed down” maths with too many helpful steps, especially when problems in the real world are not presented like this. Wolfram and Meyer’s point of view merge in that they agree we need to think more about how to map the real world into maths problems formulations. They both agree formulation is important, that real world problems are not easy. Dan proposes changes that you can make to your teaching today, whilst Wolfram proposes a more revolutionary change to the curriculum, a more radical proposal.

This proposal of Wolfram’s has been met with criticism from some teachers, as they believe that when we remove basics from teaching (what they believe is step 3), and don’t enforce that learners must know and understand the step by step process of problem solving, they encounter issues later on as they don’t have the basics. Some believe that if these steps had real world application, such as what Dan Meyer teaches, learners would be more engaged in maths and find it all less tedious. But Wolfram does believe that in some instances it is important to know why and how something works in maths, before bringing technology in and using a calculator or computer. What do you think?

Mark also talked everyone through our free resources, including our FHSST books. We are very excited to announce that we now have the complete Grade 10 maths textbook uploaded to Connexions – well done Heather! The great thing about this is that it means you can adapt, change, and edit the book, be it by adding in new chapters of your own, removing chapters, changing wording or content – whatever you like! At the click of a button you can have the chapters converted to a pdf, ready for download and or printing. How cool is that? Have a look at the chapters here, and read Heather’s blog post on her experience here.

Steve Cohen from Living Maths presented a great version of an interactive whiteboard, simply using a Wii remote, a laptop with Bluetooth and a special “pen” which makes it look like you’re writing on the wall, but really it’s the computer picking up on the movement. TED Talks first demoed this, you can watch the video which explains this awesome concept here. Teachers were very impressed with this tool, and asked many questions about the programmes needed to run it, and how it all worked.

Next week is the closing evening for these weekly functions that we have been running. If you are interested in attending, please rsvp on our web invite page here. If you have attended our functions and have any comments, suggestions or feedback, please email me (Bridget) at this domain. Also, we we welcome any discussion over our blog posts in the comment section below. If you have any thoughts on the TED Talks by Dan Meyer and Conrad Wolfram, please do comment.

read original post on bridget's Site