RebelMaths

What are Goal Free Problems? I have recently been reading "How I wish I'd Taught Maths" by Craig Barton. I'm still not even half way through the book but it is full of great ideas. Very importantly these ideas are also backed up by research and Mr. Barton makes it very easy for readers to find the research in question. So today I tried something nearly new to me. I say nearly new because I have done something similar before but never had a name for it. In the past when students have been struggling with trigonometry problems I have always advised them to find out whatever they can and then see if that helps with the question. This is probably a simplified version of the goal free problem.The idea of the goal free problem is that there is no fixed 'answer' that students need to reach. Instead they explore the question and see what 'answers' they can come up with. Today's Goal Free Problem I decided to try it out today with a first year Busine...

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...

EAMS Day 2 Day 2 of EAMS had a LOT of speakers (of which I was one). I couldn't possibly hope to do justice to all the interesting and varied content presented so I'll just pick out a few things that caught my eye and made me think "hmmm....what if I tried that out with .....". The day started out with a Keynote from Paul Milner from nationalnumeracy.org.uk  entitled "Maths outside the Classroom".  Paul introduced us to some scary statistics about the lack of Numeracy among adults (in the uk, but have no reason to believe the story would be much different in Ireland). These poor levels of Numeracy in the working adult population are costing the UK economy approximately 1.3% of GDP. He made a great point that even if we somehow got the current education system 'perfect' it would take 50 years for this to address the adult numeracy problems. We were shown a diagram from the National Numeracy website showing the three key attitudes that an adult lea...

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...

Hello and welcome to RebelMaths! Who are RebelMaths? RebelMaths are two Mathematics Educators working in the Irish Higher Education Sector. We are always seeking ways to improve our teaching and see this blog as a great motivator to make us gather some of our thoughts and maybe share some things we have learned along the way. What will the RebelMaths blog be about? We will be writing about our current interests in the field of mathematics education and I'm sure that these interests will evolve as time goes on. Currently some topics we have on our minds include E-assessment in Maths Mathematics Learning Support  Vertical non-permanent surfaces and Visibly Random Groups Peer Assisted Learning Using edTech in the Maths classroom at third level Finding great ways to teach Transposition If you are interested in any of these topics, or other topics in Maths Ed then you might like to check in from time to time to see what we are on about.