The objective of this site is to show examples of thinking in math, whether it is original solutions from students of problems, or ways to include an inquiry based approach in mathematics education. The idea for the project came from Chris Hunter as a comment on a blog post. I, David Wees, think it is such a terrific idea that I am working on implementing it.
I welcome ideas and input from anyone who is interested and would like to help support student thinking in mathematics. Please send an email with your example of original mathematical thinking by a student, or an example of a project students can do to support inquiry in mathematics to davidwees [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
David, so glad you started this! How do you plan on organizing the content?
So far the organization has just been around the two categories “Investigation” and “Student Thinking” and I haven’t given much thought on other ways to organize it. I thought about applying a Common Core classification for each investigation, but that isn’t used anywhere outside of the US, and I don’t really know it very well yet.
What would you recommend?
These are good categories. The reason I am asking is that more frequently asked question I get on other such “collection” projects is, “But where do I start? How do I find things for me?” Maybe just browsing whatever is on top is good enough an answer?!
I’m going to poll the audience and get some opinions on organization. It’s much better to figure out a decent system in advance of adding too much content.
From my perspective as someone who is planning to visit this site on a regular basis, I think it would be helpful to label all posts either Investigation or Student Thinking and provide additional labels from there. And, it would be helpful to me as a user to get an idea of the math topic involved, specifically the area of study with subcategories in parentheses. Using the current content as an example: geometry (shapes), numbers (multiplication), numbers (factoring), geometry (attributes), etc. Or, maybe simply put all the applicable category and subcategory labels on individually for greater flexibility. Just some ideas.
Hi David – couldn’t find your e-mail address but more than happy for you to link to my blog “Authentic Inquiry Maths”. Glad you find it useful.