Sunday, February 10, 2013

Mathematics Via Collaboration


I love that there are so many ways educators are employing the Web to try and improve young peoples' engagement with math! The "Collaborative Mathematics Project" from Jason Ermer is an interesting attempt to involve young math enthusiasts (or enthusiasts-to-be) through the internet's social connectivity. Read about it here:

http://www.collaborativemathematics.org/how-it-works.html

The object is, as he writes, "to use video as a means of connecting a worldwide community of mathematical problem solvers." And, as he states elsewhere on his site:
"...one of the goals of Collaborative Mathematics is to help cultivate a productive attitude toward challenging problems: one of creativity, resourcefulness, self-confidence, and perseverance.
I believe helping students to develop this productive attitude may be the most important educational objective in the classroom."

I think there may be some glitches with the effort (but I've never been good at predicting the success of such endeavors), but they can likely be overcome along the way, and it will be interesting to see how the project evolves.

Here's Jason giving out the introductory challenge:

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