Through Math for America, I am part of an ongoing collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here
Test Yourself Math — December 11th, 2013
This question is about journalist Paul Salopek’s mission to walk around the world in 7 years. Approximately how many steps will he take?
Through Math for America, I am part of an ongoing collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here
Test Yourself Math — November 27, 2013
This question is about Twitter’s recent IPO: with around 500 million users, approximately how much is Twitter valued at, per user?
I am huge fan of Desmos, the free online graphing calculator. I use it almost every day in my classroom: to sketch simple graphs, demonstrate mathematical relationships, and dynamically explore mathematical situations. And like most worthy instructional technologies, it’s really a learning technology: it’s easily accessible to students as well as teachers..
As far as technology goes, Desmos works very well. But some of my favorite mathematical questions arise when technology does something we don’t expect.
For example, here’s the graph of 
But look what happens when you zoom in around the hole:
At a very small scale, some very curious behavior emerges!
Now, it’s not the function here that’s behaving strangely: its behavior is well-understood. It’s the mathematical technology that is behaving strangely, as it tries to represent the function.
Lots of interesting questions emerge from such anomalies, and these are great questions for students to explore. In doing so, they’ll not only learn some mathematics and some computer science, but they’ll also develop a healthier relationship with technology, by learning to understand how it does what it does, and perhaps more importantly, what it doesn’t do. I explore this theme in greater depth in my talk “When Technology Fails“.
You can find more of my work with Desmos here.
Related Posts
Through Math for America, I am part of an ongoing collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here
Test Yourself Math — November 13, 2013
This question deals with the Common App, an online system that processes millions of college applications every year. What is the average number of applications processed per college?
Through Math for America, I am part of an ongoing collaboration with the New York Times Learning Network. My latest contribution, a Test Yourself quiz-question, can be found here
Test Yourself Math — October 23, 2013
This question deals with drugs prices in the United States. Drugs account for about 10% of the US’s $2.7 trillion annual health bill: how much is spent per person on drugs?