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Reading & response: From Indigenous mathematician Ed Doolittle

Doolittle (2018) Off the grid. In S.Gerofsky (Ed.)  Geometries of liberation.  New York: Palgrave, pp. 101-121. Please read this very interesting piece and write a blog post on it by Sunday, December 8 at 8:00 PM. Suggested prompts: Talk about 2 or 3 'stops' you had in reading this: things that stopped you, surprised you, etc. Think about how this paper might offer new approaches to Indigenizing mathematics curriculum and teaching. Does it challenge or stretch any of your ideas around this? The author questions the grid concept "We know well the benefits of using the grid, but what are the  dangers? What are the preconditions for the grid which may not be satisfied in real-world applications? What are the extremes at which the grid can  fail? What are the consequences of failure? And what are the alternatives?" This questioning process makes me think of the development of Non-Euclidean geometry which also starts from questioning the truth of Euclid's 5...

The Wine & Rats Puzzle

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Solution: We can use the following Binary number system to solve this puzzle. First, number the bottles from 1 - 1000. Convert the bottle number to binary. Number the rats D1, D1, D2, ...., D9 representing the binary digits. Then, rats will drink wine in the following rule: Binary number of bottle 1 is 0000000001. Rat D1 will drink wine from bottle 1 Binary number of bottle 5 is 0000000101. Rats D1 and D3 will drink wine from bottle 6. Binary number of bottle 12 is 0000001100. Rats D3 and D4 will drink wine from bottle 12. ..... Hence, by seeing which rats have died, we can figure out which bottle is poisoned. For example: If rats D3 and D4 die, then we know the bottle 12 is poisoned. 1000 bottles can be represented with 10 binary digits (binary number of bottle 1000 is 1111101000) , and we have 10 rats (each rat represents 1 digit), so we are able to use 10 rats to test 1000 bottles of wine.

Unit Plan 2nd Draft

Unit plan: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dEA-K0NxATPNhRoQvEhQ9RBmYYXjUbVC/view?usp=sharing Lesson Plans: Lesson Plan 1 Lesson Plan 2 Lesson Plan 3

First Draft of Unit Plan & Lesson Plan

Unit plan: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kwqfNnzoaGwlhGIeDGthOhWikcvFCD67/view?usp=sharing Lesson Plans: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BuMyxkr9X7D-G-IN_RR4fiBqsP6bOy95/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1clL_FGBXZ5MJ0-7ZqO_2g7cWX6VX8mqa/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RoZh1UWJTGV4a56NaXunW8yUH1NTzq0o/view?usp=sharing

Blog Reading - Thinking of Math Textbooks

Here is an interesting critical-thinking take on the ways that math textbooks may 'speak to' their readers (assuming that people actually do read and listen to math textbooks...) Wagner & Herbel-Eisenmann on math textbooks and the ways they may position their readers Please read this thought-provoking article and blog on: •How you respond to the examples given here -- as a teacher and as a former student •What are your thoughts about the reasons for using/ not using textbooks, and the changing role of math textbooks in schools? The author gave an example that TMM's initial "investigation" whose instruction included much more exclusive imperatives (or "scribbler" imperatives such as "write", "calculate" and "copy" ) than inclusive imperatives ("thinker" imperatives like "describe", "explain", "prove"). I agree that it is appropriate to scribble before thi...

The scales puzzle

My first though is to figure out 4 numbers from 1 to 40 that can be added together to obtain any whole numbers from 1 to 40. So, one of the 4 weights must be 1g, which is the smallest weight. Should the next be 2g? There is only one whole number can be obtained by combining 1g and 2g, which is 3g. What about 3g? The combinations of 1g and 3g give us 2 whole numbers, which are 2g (3g-1g) and 4g (1g+3g). What about 4g? But any combination of 1g and 4g won't give me 2g. Now, 1g and 3g are the two of the 4 weights in my mind. And using a similar pattern, I figure out 9g is one of the 4 weights: Combination of 1, 3, 5: 3-1=2 3+1=4 5-1=4 5-3=2 Obviously, 5g is not a choice since numbers obtained by combining 1,3 and 5 can be obtained by combinations of 1 and 3 as well. New numbers produced by combining 1, 3 and 6 6-1=5 6+1=7 6+3+1=10 Now we have 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 10 New numbers produced by combining 1, 3 and 7 7+3=10 7-1=6 7+1=8 7+3+1=11 7+3-1 7+1-3 Now we have 1...

Math Art Project Reflection

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Sorry for missing this art project reflection.  The image shown above is the our replica of Mergerate’ art work which is the work we investigate in this project. I would like to thank my group member Kyle for setting up the project on LaTeX. Then we finished coding as a group. In this work, the triangular grids are numbered sequentially beginning with 1 at the centre and continuing outward along a spiral path to 486 at the far left. A triangle is coloured cyan if it is prime, magenta if it is a happy number, and yellow if it is a triangular numbers. The Fibonacci number is represented as a transparent white triangles layered on top. A blended colour is used for integers belonging to more than one sequence.  Following is our extended art work. After group discussion, we decided to include perfect squares and lucky numbers in our extended art work.  We found that the perfect squares produced an interesting "spiral galaxy" pattern with 5 arms that was sim...