CTK Insights

If you have not read yet a memo by Steve's Google Platform rant, you should. A first-hand account on management practice and philosophy differences between Amazon and Google. The memo has been intended for internal google distribution but somehow found its way to a wider audience. Besides revealing some truths about the two successful online [...]

At the beginning of his career, Doug Rohrer - presently Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida - was a math teacher. As such, he was used to begin his mathematics classes with thought provokers, the kind of puzzles that are intrinsically provocative and whose solution - often surprising - does not require [...]

Simple mathematics may be rather impressive even on an early developmental level. The "1089 prediction" is one of the better known tricks that may be presented to the 3-4 grade audience. David Acheson describes it thus: Think of a three-digit number. Any three-figure number will do, so long as the first and last figures differ [...]

This is just to document a few simple math and logic activities recently added to the Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles site. Filling a Grid with Good Neighbors There is a number of chips placed in the squares of an N×N grid. We can add a chip to a square, provided it has at least [...]

I am going to quote from a new book by Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner (p. 26). Alice Schaefer (1915-2009), a US mathematician, head of the mathematics department at Wellesley College from 1962 to 1980, happened to skip from third to fourth grade. At the time her teacher said that, although she and one of [...]

Three ropes have been fastened to a horizontal plunk, tangled a little as if one tried to make a braid and, lastly, loosely attached to an auxiliary plank to keep them braided. Down below there is a third plank. The task is to attach three additional ropes to the first ones at one end and [...]

Denise of the superb blog Let's Play Math has streamlined my online version of Euclid's game. The game provides a playful practice for the divisibility, gcd and some counting. The game (more accurately, the Java applet) has been written more than a decade ago when I just began to learn the Java language. At the [...]

Valerie Strauss in the Answer Sheet blog tells us of the "most powerful learning experience" Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, shared with author and educator Sam Chaltain. Arne Duncan's Learning Story I grew up going to my mother’s afterschool tutoring program in a church basement on the South Side of Chicago. It is [...]

Here is a question: should students be given partial credit for incomplete solutions. I was still reading Andrei Toom's online book to which I referred in the previous post when I was advised on twitter.com that New York City Council is in turmoil over a controversial policy that gives students partial credit for wrong answers [...]

I've been following the links the new edition of the Carnival of Mathematics sponsored by the Wild About Math! blog. This is an issue #66, and it appears that I have learned about this undertaking relatively late, of which I regret. It is a curious collection of online articles. The next submissions deadline is set [...]