Arithmagons

What is an arithmagon?

A picture is worth 1000 words …

Clearly the numbers in the rectangles are the sum of the numbers in the adjacent circles. Of course there is no need to use addition and no need to use triangular arithmagons!

These could used with students of all ages. Young children could practice basic skills or students studying advanced Mathematics could look at Calculus or Complex Numbers for example.

The challenge is of course to go backwards…

Nrich have some very useful resources including this introduction to arithmagons which includes an interactive allowing numbers to be changed and would work well on an interactive whiteboard. See also these further Nrich resources – this on multiplication and for older students a rather more advanced multiplication arithmagon using complex numbers.

For more ideas to use with advanced students see Jonny Griffiths RISPs; RISP21is on ‘Advanced Arithmagons’  (if you choose RISPs organised by topic you will see RISP21 Advanced Arithmagons under Basic Algebra).

Jonny Griffiths RISPS have been mentioned before – see the Rich Tasks resources. Another site included in the Rich Tasks resources is the New Zealand Maths problem solving site; a resource on that site uses arithmagons to form and solve linear and simple quadratic equations.

Happy Birthday WolframAlpha!

Busy in a computer room this morning one of my year 9 (UK age 13-14) students informed me that WolframAlpha is 2 today!

I show all my students WolframAlpha in class and sometimes use it in class to check a result. I have been pleased to see students using it themselves.

See the WolframAlpha page and subpages for further details of WolframAlpha including several useful links.

Embed Google Docs into WordPress

An excellent new feature for WordPress users was announced recently. It is now possible to embed documents created with Google Docs into a WordPress blog.

To try out this new feature – here is a form I created to help students think about the personal learning and thinking skills they are using in Mathematics.

Obviously this was not originally designed for a narrow column such as this but the whole process is very easy – an outstanding addition to WordPress. Thank you Happiness Engineers!

Mathematical Twitter

A quick post today as I have spent the day marking exams – but I can’t spoil my post a week WordPress challenge!

A subject I wrote about some time ago and one I’ll return to again but Twitter is worth considering as one can be very selective and follow a limited number of people.

Take a look the following for example and the links in the above post (you do not need to be registered with Twitter).

Mathscareers Website

Wolfram Fun Facts   

Mathslinks  

…back to the marking!

Mathematics Blogs

There are numerous Mathematics blogs out there!

Use Mathblogging.org to see recent posts from an extensive collection of blogs.

The Edublogs Directory has a Math and Science Section, like Mathsblogging.org it is possible to see when each blog was last updated.

A site always popular with my students who like the very clear notes available is mr barton maths.com. Mr Barton also has a blog (thank you for the mention, mr barton!) Note the link to the lovely set of 30 puzzles in his recent post – Lovely Puzzles.

A blog I have mentioned previously is ‘Teaching AQA GCSE Maths’ from the Longman Maths publishing team. Obviously this is of particular interest to teachers teaching the AQA specification, however they sometime provide free resources of interest to any Maths teacher. This recent post for example features a free algebra resource including teachers’ notes. This works very well on the interactive whiteboard.  An earlier post gave a link to a free book –  ‘Street Fighting Mathematics’ by Sanjoy Mahajan. The post includes a link for a free pdf download.

Some of the Nrich team can be found on Twitter and also have blogs. See the note at the foot of  Jennifer Piggott’s article.

Two more of my own favourites include Dan Meyer’s blog and Guillermo Bautista’s very well organised ‘Mathematics and Multimedia‘; this includes an extensive collection of clear tutorials on GeoGebra. For further links on Geogebra see this earlier post.