Math Teachers at Play Blog Carnival #56

Math Teachers at Play is a Blog Carnival for teachers, parents, homeschoolers and anyone else interested in learning and teaching mathematics.  It's home base is over at the Let's Play Math website, and I'm delighted to host this edition here.

According to the tradition of MTaP we start with some trivia related to edition number. Fifty six is a tetrahedral number, the sum of the first six triangular numbers. To model this number we laid out tiles to for the triangular numbers and then stacked them.

Math books and crafts

Learner's in Bloom has a wonderful visual presentation of the fibonacci sequence for preschoolers. She also presents preschool math activities based on the book Double the Ducks.

Denise at Let's Play Math shares her excitement about the fun book Who Killed Professor X. You can watch the book's trailer from her post.

Highhill Homeschool describes drawing longitude and latitude lines on a map and then scaling the map to fit their posterboard.

John Cook used a buckyball model to Euler's formula: vertices minus edges plus faces = two.

Math Games

Math in Your Feet gives instructions on making a math game. This is an amazing dominoes like game using pictures showing factors. You can build your own set. I know I will be.

If your not interested in building your own set of a game, Math Insider shares reviews of ten commercial math boardgames. Looking for a game to practice addition? What about fractions? This post will show you which game to look for.

Photographing Math 

Last week's photo challenge theme was Geometry Photos.

Malke from Math in Your feeta collection of photos of arrays for seeing multiplication.

Puzzling with Math

Rodi Steinig wrote about the questions she posed to her math circle. Her summary: "The 'meat' of this post is about using the game 'Would You Rather' to explore statistics in the big picture, i.e. can you trust them? It gives a brief accessible mystery to draw kids into a discussion about measures of central tendency versus dispersion." Teaching and Learning Connection provides two related activities challenging students to think of formulas using dates or license plate numbers. Her instructions are posted in the form of word documents.

Rhonda at K-12 Math Problems poses the challenge of explaining which of two roads are longer. The roads are based on semi-circles.

Math Hombre demonstrates turning math into art with his post on the Exponential Potential.

Understanding Math

Sue VanHattum at Math Mama discusses different proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem.

Math 4 Teaching explains deriving the quadratic formula with beautiful visuals to help students make sense of it.

Loved for Math Ed explains the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean Inequality.

Math and Multimedia writes about using motion questions to introduce calculus.

Proofs From the Book describes why we reverse inequality signs when multiplying both sides of the inequality by a negative number.

Math is not a Four Letter word explains the difference between a an ellipse and ellipsis. and a post arguing against the Drop Everything and Read campaign in schools for its prioritizing of reading over mathematical and other skills in schools.



For more math fun, visit the Carnival of Mathematics and the Carnival of Mathematics and Multimedia.