Tag: Crowd-Funding Mathematics Research

Experiential Learning: An Effective Teaching Strategy for Mathematics

Mathematics is undeniably a hard subject. Even the great minds of the past such as Albert Einstein know for a fact that there are difficulties in learning the matter. No wonder Math teachers experience difficulties in the way they teach students. The lecture approach where teachers let students memorize mathematical facts has long been gone. Today, teachers are called on to teach new and effective teaching methods to develop not only mastery, but comprehension as well.

Mathematics requires experiential learning where students are involved in their own understanding of mathematical concepts and practices. Through this type of learning, students are able to identify problems, use constructive reasoning to make viable arguments, and applying mathematics in real-life problems.

On improving mathematical concepts, a recent study explained that problem solving in mathematics is not a natural talent, but learned. The teacher’s role is to guide students through practice, provide both routine and non-routine problems, and help them develop their own strategies in solving those problems. In addition, the study highlights the importance of including the students in developing skills in problem solving and sharing them through argumentative discussions.

Traditionally, math textbooks often just provide fixed examples without providing rich experiences in problem solving. Teachers too often review the answers immediately without explaining what strategies students use to solve the problems or if the solutions can be explained by the students themselves.

For teachers to build their students’ mathematical problem solving strategies, they need to provide instruction that explores new concepts through scaffolding. Scaffolding includes asking guide questions that lead to answers rather than supplying them immediately.

In regards to experiential learning at the high school level, teachers need to focus on reasoning and acquire a sense of using mathematics on their daily lives. This is because U.S. high school students have the inability to apply math to solve problems in a variety of situations. This trends needs to be improved through experiential learning.

Crowd-Funding Mathematics Research

What if your research was financed by 100 unknown people who had read your research offer on the internet and clicked “donate”? You’d feel accountable to write about your research in a more accessible way. You might commit to provide monthly up-dates to your customers instead of delivering them an actual item. Or maybe high-paying contributors could get a 3-D printed physical representation, a software, or access to an application on the internet. While mathematics may not be winning any popularity competitions among the general population, scientific research is still valued enough by the public that researchers are currently using websites like https://experiment.com/. This site is particularly designed to financing scientific research just as websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are designed to help start-up companies. This idea is very attractive since several mathematics education projects are looking for resources through crowd funding:

  • Gary Antonick at the New York Times Numberplay recently lately presented Primo, a mathematical activity designed by Dan Finkel, who weblogs at Math For Love. The experience is based off of thinking of primary factors as corresponding to different colors, enabling even young kids to play the gane and learn basic functions as well as sensible techniques for managing their two pawns.
  • Similarly, the Moebius Noodles weblog is hosting a crowd-funding strategy for Camp Logic, a book that presents teenagers to logic via games and questions. You can review the book for free, which is written by Mark Saul and Sian Zelbo from the Courant Institute’s Center for Mathematical Talent.

Seeing the achievements experienced by these strategies so far will make you think about how this could be a limited remedy to the issues mentioned by Tabatha O’Neil at Mathbabe concerning the decreasing number of studies financed by government resources. One example of a research including mathematics that seems to have involved many people, enough to get their money is OpenWorm. This is a venture that is designed to create a digital worm from scratch by using researcher’s knowledge of the molecular components within the worm.