The Sum of our Knowledge

Many times, we use the same old icebreakers at the beginning of a class:  go around the room, introduce yourself, your major, a hobby or something interesting about yourself . What if instead, we could get our students working together and engaging in mathematical problem-solving from the get-go? Today’s post is the first in a four-part series where we'll present several ideas and strategies to accomplish this, most of which are appropriate for any level of mathematics course. Review Dominos We have found that this activity works great in many situations-- Our favorites uses: An icebreaker on the first day of class, while also reviewing material from a previous class. Low stakes group work to practice basic computation relating to newly learned material on an average class day A group warm-up, reviewing material from a previous day that is crucial to know before beginning class. A small-group project before an exam review. This activity requires a small amount of preparation up fro...

I was honored earlier this month to be recognized by Stephen Wolfram as one of the recipients of the Wolfram Innovator Award at the annual Wolfram Technology Conference.   (Here is the official announcement of the Award Winners . ) This award is given annually to educational and scientific pioneers that use Wolfram’s Mathematica ™ software to bring the future to today.   The awarded project was the result of a large number of people at the University of Minnesota working to lower the cost of college attendance by replacing expensive textbooks with technology better suited to the needs of 21 st century students. In addition, this technological innovation has improved the way we deliver instruction at MathCEP . The project, now known as the Minnesota Online Learning System (MOLS), delivers assessments to students using the Mathematica platform. It replaced a publisher’s automated homework system initially, and then expanded to house the University of Minnesota’s math placeme...

Here's a puzzle that was first passed on to me by Al Lippert, who spent years providing the "Problem of the Day" at MathPath .  What goes after the last equals sign? Hints: The answer we're looking for isn't 80.  And the equalities are all true! Update: 11/6/20: read below for the solution.

  As COVID ramped up last spring, in-person classes came to an abrupt halt.  Many of us had just a few days to transition into online teaching, and very little ( if any ) formal training.  In fact, most of us had never even taken an online course ourselves. We lacked any model for constructing our courses in the online environment, and we did the best that we could to just teach our students something… anything! We know that many of you have been in limbo, and trying to prepare for this year without knowing whether you will be in a virtual, hybrid, or in-person environment.  Here in the math department at the University of Minnesota, we’ve been preparing for online teaching since June, and some of us have been teaching in an online/hybrid environment for years.  We’d like to use the MathCEP platform to share our experiences and resources with you.  This blog post is just the beginning. In this post, two postdocs at the University of Minnesota, Alexis Johnso...