Online Whiteboards – update

The post on Online Whiteboards includes Screenr which works very well. Formerly just for use by Twitter users you can now sign in to Screenr in a variety of ways including with a Facebook account.

Dancing the Bubble Sort

Teachers of Decision Mathematics will be familiar with sorting algorithms which put elements in a list in order. A bubble sort is a sorting algorithm that works by working through the list to be sorted, comparing each pair of adjacent items and swapping them if they are in the wrong order. The pass through the list is repeated until no further swaps are necessary, the elements are then all in order having ‘bubbled’ to their correct positions.

This video shows how the list 9, 8, 4, 6, 3 is sorted using the algorithm.

Checking my email today I noticed this link from the Maths Links group on Diigo shared by Garrett Eastman.

The link is to Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog where he has embedded this video created by Sapientia University in Romania showing a bubble sort illustrated by a Hungarian folk dance.

For further dancing of sorting algorithms see this YouTube channel.

Teaching sorting algorithms will never be quite the same again! If you look at the comments on Nathan’s blog some users have spotted errors but it certainly illustrates the comparison of adjacent pairs very well indeed.

For some more beautiful dance moves see this image!

Math Contest – University of Mississippi

For weekly problems try the challenges from the University of Mississippi.
Four problems are set every week.

The Problem of the Week and Algebra in Action challenges are open to anyone from anywhere of any age! The Middle School Madness and Elementary Brain Teaser problems are for school age children, Middle School Madness for grade 8 (age 14 and under), the Elementary Brain Teaser for grade 6 (age 12 and under). If you submit a correct solution by the deadline that week your name will be published on the website. You might even win a T-shirt!

Time for some games …..

Thinkfun provide an excellent range of games, some of which are available to play online including the very popular Rush Hour. The other games are for younger players including ‘What’s Gnu?’ – a verbal game.

Thanks to Andrew Jeffrey for the link to Chocolate Fix in his latest newsletter.

There is an online version of Rush Hour programmed by Mark Riedel including 40 different challenges from beginner to expert available on Thinkfun’s Puzzles.com site.

This has been added to the puzzles page on the Mathematics Games blog which includes many favourites from Nrich which have all worked very well in the classroom. Many of the Nrich games work very well on the interactive whiteboard as full screen versions are available.

The extensive and excellent resources collection on Mathisfun includes numerous games. Many of my students tried and enjoyed RayRay recently.

Can you make these little people all stand up?

For all my favourite games see this blog – Mathematics Games and Puzzles.

Bloomin’ Mathematics

It seemed that everywhere I looked today I kept finding Kathy Schrock’s ‘Bloomin’ Google‘ where she has categorised Google tools according to Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Her blog post explains its origins.

My Digital Tools blog has information on Bloom’s taxonomy, in particular the digital version of the taxonomy which accounts for the new technologies and the processes and actions associated with them.

Thinking about the different levels of the taxonomy is useful when planning questions for students. So often questions relate only to the lower order thinking skills.

Nrich has a small number of articles on Bloom’s taxonomy, this by Jennifer Piggott showing the heirarchy of thinking skills together with skills and question cues and this by Jenni Way on using questioning to stimulate mathematical thinking, with an addendum also which includes ideas for questions to use for student investigation.

Lindsey Shorser has written a short paper on the interpretation of Bloom’s taxonomy for Mathematics.

A very useful resource is this booklet of sample questions which has been created as part of a project funded by the NCETM on Questioning the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy (scroll down the page for the final report). I have tried many of these in the classroom, they really make students think and encourage a deep understanding.

For further questions which require higher order thinking skills see the Levelopaedia from Kangaroo Maths which has numerous probing questions by level and also the focused assessment materials  which make it clear what students should be able to do and give probing questions.

See also: Rich Questions.