A post on Fawn Nguyen’s site reminded me that in one of my other lives I was just a middle school computer teacher! And then following those few years when I only taught computers, I taught math in a computer lab. Even though it’s pretty much ancient history, I thought it might be fun to share some of the ideas — if you are a math teacher with access to a lab (portable or another room you can use) or if you are a computer lab teacher who wants to support math teachers maybe you can adapt some of these ideas to 2012!
Tessellation Tutorials
I developed this idea (namely, this HyperCard tutorial: http://mathforum.org/sum95/suzanne/tess.html ) for my computer elective students. At that time (1995) HyperCard was the only software on the Macs in my lab! Between 1995 and 2000 I added other tutorials for other software programs. I’ve not added anything lately but there’s probably enough there to figure out how to adapt the idea to a paint program that your students have access to on their computers.
CCSSM: developing understanding of transformations (translation, reflection, rotation) in middle school would support what’s expected of students in High School: Geometry
Locker Problem Activity
(includes a link to Nathalie Sinclair’s applet)
Traffic Jam Activity
(includes a link to Mike Morton’s applet – he wrote for me in 1996 and amazingly it still works!)
Ask Dr. Math “Link” pages
I used to write web pages with a focused number of Ask Dr. Math threads. I had students work in pairs and take “Cornell Notes”
These are the pages I wrote:
But you could also use some of the Ask Dr. Math: Selected Answers pages:
Software I used in my lab (or similar new ones!) that are available for free:
KaleidoTile – http://geometrygames.org/KaleidoTile/index.html
KaleidoPaint – http://geometrygames.org/KaleidoPaint/index.html
Torus Games - http://geometrygames.org/TorusGames/index.html
Curved Spaces - http://geometrygames.org/CurvedSpaces/index.html
Wow, I do remember HyperCard! That seemed like a long time ago! I know your Locker and Traffic Jam (sometimes aka frog leaps) applets well. The 4 software you listed look like a lot of fun to play with. Thanks for the mention and sharing these resources, Suzanne!
Yes, frog leaps is another variation. For fun I went looking for applets with the frogs and I found:
Hooda Math: Frog Leap
http://hoodamath.com/games/frogleap.php
A Kid’s Math: Leap Frog
http://akidsmath.com/mathgames/leapfrog.htm
The second one is super cute … but … there’s one feature of Mike Morton’s Traffic Jam applet that I really love — it keeps track of the number of moves. My middle school kids had trouble counting how many moves they took even when they worked with partners. I wanted them focusing on the number of moves and so that feature was important to me.
And so, here’s my very favorite version with frogs that I’ve seen so far!
Maths – Investigations – Leapfrog
http://www.subtangent.com/maths/ig-leapfrog.php
Traffic Jam can be adjusted with 2 players on each side or 4 players on each side but Leapfrog has even more possibilities. And…there are other “investigations”, too.
I checked Math Tools – http://mathforum.org/mathtools/ – just to see if we had cataloged any of these in that digital library and found that we do have Leapfrog from subtangent.com and we also have Nathalie Sinclair’s version. She also has some variations that extend the investigation.
Tool: Play with Frogs
http://mathforum.org/mathtools/tool/955/
Nathalie Sinclair
Tool: Leapfrog
http://mathforum.org/mathtools/tool/97200/
Duncan Keith (subtangent.com)