Working Out Workshops

This past week at RabbitMath has included lots of planning for our summer workshops, starting this weekend. We have a big group of students signed up already and are working to give them the best experience possible in the online format.

One of the things we’ve given a lot of thought to is the implementation of activities that focus on using games to build mathematical thinking skills and intuition. This can work for a wider variety of students than problems that focus strictly on technical skills. The idea behind the focus on games is that the more students work with structure, the better they’ll understand it. Peter often uses the example of a smartphone; most of us don’t know how our phones work, but that doesn’t stop us from learning what they do and how we can use them. The same can be true of concepts in math and understanding of how they work often follows intuition built by working with them.

We have enough students signed up so far that we’d like to do lots of work in smaller groups where students can collaborate on problems together. For some activities it will make sense to break off into groups by grade, because different problem-solving strategies will work with different skills. Some of the problems we’ve looked at can be solved easily with calculus that a grade 12 student might know but can equally be solved using algebra or geometry. For other activities it will make more sense to divide students into groups of mixed skill levels so that they can learn from each other. In a physical classroom, students could look around the room and put themselves into a group, and we would mill around to help guide people towards solutions. In an online learning environment, we need to be more mindful in advance about how we’ll manage that to make sure that people are in groups best suited to their level of confidence with the concepts and the activity at hand.

Our goal for the Saturday workshops is to have students working with concepts and sophisticated narratives, and to be building things. We’re still working on the final details, but we’ve got lots planned for our summer program students. We’re looking forward to meeting them this weekend!

Peter Taylor Quote of the Week: “The dream is to have kids walk out of my lectures saying, ‘that was an experience.’”