RebelMaths

Promoting Discussion in Higher Education Mathematics. Over the last few years I have tried several different ways to incorporate group work and discussion in my Higher Education Mathematics classroom/lectures. Students don't instinctively love talking about maths! It takes a bit of work to set up some reason for students to get involved in mathematical discussion. I've tried the usual things: The basic "have a chat with your neighbour about that",The incentivised by fear "check your answers with you neighbour because I'll randomly pick someone to ask". The classic "think-pair-share". I've really enjoyed using the method from Peter Liljedahl's thinking classroom of using Vertical Non Permanent Surfaces (#VNPS). The rule I promote is that if you are writing on the board you can't write your own ideas, someone needs to tell you what to write. I find this works very well to promote discussions about interesting problems. This...

Domino logic Gates: A hands on lesson on boolean logic One of my favourite classes this year was one where we built domino Logic gates. We were seven weeks into a first year maths course for computer science students. We had been working through sets  then algebra and then Boolean Algebra. Each week we had one three hour lecture (horrific, right). In the seventh week there was the first in class test for the module and I knew that the students were going to be tired after doing the test and I needed to keep it "light" somehow for the remainder of the three hour period. I was also working with these same students in a module called Effective Learning and Development and from discussion in that module I knew that a few of the learners were the type of learner that liked to move and do hands on work (there was a time that I would have said they were learners with a kinesthetic learning style but I know that is all out of vogue at the moment). I had been thinking of ways to t...

About six months ago I was browsing on twitter when I came across some Maths education people tweeting about #VRG, #VNPS and #thinkingclassroom. This led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of figuring out what these mysterious acronyms stood for. In today’s blog post I’m going to focus on #VRG which, I discovered, stands for Visibly Random Groups. Visibly Random groups is an idea put forward by Peter Liljedahl.  Usually when it comes to carrying out some group work in the classroom there are two standard ways that the groups are formed. Either the students themselves pick the groups or the teacher picks the groups. When the teacher picks the groups, there is usually some underlying reason that the groups are assigned in this way. Perhaps the teacher wants to make sure that there is one strong student in each group. Or maybe the teacher wants to split up some students who tend to be chatty. When the students pick the groups they will tend to pick groups with their friends. In v...