Wanyi’s EDCP 342A Math Blog

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...

"....the use of extrinsic rewards can create a set of expectations on the children's part that dampens their future interest in activities if extrinsic rewards are not provided. It reminds me of my experience of teaching 10th grade mathematics in Shanghai. 10th Grade has 4 homeroom, and students have all the classes in their homeroom. I was a math teacher of two homerooms and my colleague was teaching the other two. In my colleague's class, students would get a token every time they answer a question, and students were told that there would be a reward for students who gained the most amount of tokens. In the middle of the semester, one of her student transferred to my classroom for some reasons. And my new student was disappointed after he knew I was not doing this reward activity. After knowing this kind of extrinsic rewards was happening in the other two homerooms, my students wish I could do this as well. I appreciated the effort that my colleague had put to encoura...

We revised our lesson plan several times. Our drafted lesson plan had a video at the beginning  introducing the laws of exponents, then there was a recap on each exponent laws and practice problems at the end of the lesson. Thanks Susan for remaining us to think about the use of the video. We had a debate on whether we shall keep the video or not. We finally decided to play the video at the very end of the lesson after the practice problems, as a review, and added one related simple problem after each law was introduced. My big take away from the the process of creating a lesson plan is that we have to be clear about the purpose of everything including the activities and use of media, that we plan to do in our lesson, and make sure it efficiently serve our student's learning. Also, creating a lesson collaboratively as a group can be challenging when we have different thoughts. I learned from my partners that we should not hesitate to share our different thoughts in a respectful wa...

The Table M.1-Dichotomies Underling Different Stances in Mathematic Education remains me of a conversation about the difference of mathematics education between China and Canada with an instructor of teacher education college from China. He said educators in China have been aware that students could be benefit from inquiry-based learning, however, because university entrance exam was very competitive and challenging, teacher focused much on teaching in a "traditional" way to help students success in the exams, and had no time spending on teaching through inquiry. I quite understand the situation since I was born and raised in China. Chinese education system and policy have a big impact on teacher's teaching method. But I also came up with a question that if the situation will not be changed in a short period, how can educators in China help student success in the university entrance exam, in the meanwhile efficiently integrating inquiry into their teaching? The article ...

Here is the link for the  lesson plan :  https://docs.google.com/ document/d/1etGrGcqE- e4oPHBfrTyiv0mbyIDHRFBaLWJ8ner _2lE/edit?usp=sharing Here is the link for the  presentation slides :  https://docs.google. com/presentation/d/ 1P4FjxiBigrhkAtP5T1KoncAuyrga6 YD-SvBxiCvTQN8/edit?usp= sharing

Thirty equally spaced points on the circumference of a circle are labelled in order with the numbers 1  to 30. Which number is diametrically opposite to 7? (From the UK Association of Teachers of Mathematics book,  Eight Days A Week ) My thoughts: 7 and it's opposite number form half of a circle. 30/2=15  So there are 7's opposite number is 15 (including it self) numbers away from 7.  7+15=22 Therefore, 22 is the the number diametrically opposite to 7. • What process did you use to work on and solve this puzzle? First I started form a small number which are 4 equally spaced points on the circumference. the number diametrically opposite to 1 is 3, which is 1+4/2. From that I found a pattern that a number and it's opposite number form half of a circle, and the opposite number = number + number of points/2. • Could you create other extended puzzles related to this one -- some possible, some impossible?  (Is there any value to giving your students imposs...

"How many guests are there?" said the official. "I don't know.", said the cook, "but every 2 used a dish of rice, every 3 used a dish of broth, and every 4 used a dish of meat between them".  There were 65 dishes in all.  How many guests were there? Taken from A puzzle from 4th century CE, China from the Sunzi Suan Jing 孙子算经 Please consider: • Whether it makes a difference to our students to offer examples, puzzles and histories of mathematics from diverse cultures (or from 'their' cultures!) • Whether the word problem/ puzzle story matters or makes a difference to our enjoyment of solving it. Solution: Let x be the number of guests, then we know that there are x/2 dishes of rices ( "every 2 used a dish of rice") , x/3 dishes of broth ( "every 3 used a dish of broth") , and x/4 dishes of meat. Then  we can have the following equation: x/2 + x/3 + x/4 = 65. 13x/12 = 65 x = 60 After solving the equation above, we have x...

The common suggestions I got from my peers are that the clarity of presentation and activity, timing and pacing should be improved. And the learning objectives should be better addressed and met. I agree with that. The paper cutting activity involved approximately drawing 6 rectangles in same size and have even space between them. By observation, Brenda and Hugo spent the most of time to use ruler to try to draw these rectangles accurately. This is an excellent strategy, but it is hard to finish in 6 minutes. And Danielle had no problem with the "approximately" and successfully finish the paper cutting. The takeaways from this micro-teaching are that if the instruction is unclear, people in the same group will have different way to implement the activity, then the outcomes will be diverse. And 10 mins is a very very short time for teaching one skill to beginners, especially for cutting 囍 whose instruction can be complicated. For the next micro-teaching, I should carefully c...

Lesson Name : Micro-teaching Lesson: Chinese Paper Cutting Instructor ’s Name:   Wanyi  Li                               Date:   Oct. 2 , 2019 Instructional Objective(s): Be familiar with Chinese paper cutting including its history and properties, and know how to make a paper cutting about a Chinese character, 囍. Lesson Activities: Teacher Activities Student Activities Time Introduction: 1.   Asking warn up questions to check prior knowledge/experience of Chinese paper cutting. 2.   Sharing My personal experience with paper cutting. Body: 1.   Introducing the origin/history/use of Chinese paper cutting. 2.   Exploring the properties of Chinese paper cutting including elements and their meanings/geometric property   and its meaning. 3.   Furthe...