For the Love of Mathematics
How would students feel when learning through the use of mathematical modeling? On investigation, this article reveals that students felt better prepared for assessments, learned valuable life skills, and saw the relevance of mathematics to their lives outside of the classroom.
We discuss how discourse actions can provide students greater access to high quality mathematics. We define discourse actions as what teachers or students say or do to elicit student contributions about a mathematical idea and generate ongoing discussion around student contributions. We provide rubrics and checklists for readers to use.
We present a Scratch task we designed and implemented for teaching and learning coordinates in a dynamic and engaging way. We use the 5Es framework to describe the students' interactions with the task and offer suggestions of how other teachers may adopt it to successfully implement Scratch tasks.
In this article, we discuss funky protractor tasks, which we designed to provide opportunities for students to reason about protractors and angle measure. We address how we have implemented these tasks, as well as how students have engaged with them.