STEM-based understandings and experiences that prepare learners beyond the classroom are of imminent need, as today's STEM education students are tomorrow's leaders in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and education (Prabhu, 2009). Integrative STEM education signifies the intentional integration of science and mathematics with the…

Socrates argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. For the past decade, the authors--along with many colleagues, organizations, and commercial firms--have been immersed in the booming, buzzing confusion that is the community landscape of higher education. They have communities that build software (e.g., Jasig, Kuali, Moodle, Sakai),…

Educational games have great potential as tools for motivating and engaging students, in addition to teaching learning content and objectives, but have had difficulty proving their potential through traditional means. This article proposes that recent advances in the achievement systems of entertainment games can be used to measure motivation and…

As part of promoting and improving pattern discovery skills among school children, a Sudoku puzzle can be used as example of a problem solving task. A simplified version of the puzzle will be used first to explain the aim and reinforce the rules of solving the puzzle. Three strategies--"Strategy of Obvious Missing Number, Strategy of…

What needs to be done to strengthen U.S. democracy, to make it work the way it should? Each generation of Americans asks some version of this question, but this book offers an answer that recognizes the heightened urgency and hopefulness in the way individuals are asking the question today. At the heart of the debate is a conviction that…

The famous Birthday Problem is a staple in introductory probability texts and can be stated as follows: What is the probability that at least two persons from "n" randomly chosen persons have the same birthday? In this article, the author suggests an adaptation of the birthday problem which can be repeated in class until the full effect…

This article describes a unit of work that was designed for a Year 9 class of mixed ability and which involved the definition and measurement of angles, as well as the practical application of angle properties--such as complimentary angles and the relationships in a transversal. The unit considered the numeracy skills required to interpret a…

This classroom note is presented as a suggested exercise--not to have the class prove or disprove Goldbach's Conjecture, but to stimulate student discussions in the classroom regarding proof, as well as necessary, sufficient, satisfied, and unsatisfied conditions. Goldbach's Conjecture is one of the oldest unsolved problems in the field of number…

In this article, the author suggests that to improve the teaching of mathematics in elementary schools, we must, when teaching content courses to prospective teachers, model the kind of teaching we want them to engage in. The author suggests ways to model this kind of teaching, which include the following: (1) challenge "all" students; (2)…

In Mr. Wood's technology class, students learned about many aspects of engineering, including design of a product, teamwork, testing hypotheses, and testing the final product. In this article, the author describes how his class, particularly his team, applied everything they learned about the process to their kayak design challenge using the IDEAL…

The author knows from teaching young children herself how challenging it can be to face an endless parade of students reporting things to teachers as they're trying to teach. Figuring out how to deal with tattling takes time and energy and, as a result, teachers are often tempted to tell children to keep problems to themselves. Indeed, some…

Posing mathematics problems in different ways will raise students' level of cognitive demand because it will push them to think more deeply about mathematics. By engaging students in a task that requires them to determine their own solution strategies, students will gain a deeper understanding of the mathematical concept explored through the task.…

This paper argues that design fixation, in part, entails fixation at the level of meta-representation, the representation of the relation between a representation and its reference. In this paper, we present a mathematical model that mimics the idea of how fixation can occur at the meta-representation level. In this model, new abstract concepts…

Recreational Programming (RecPro) is the discipline that encourages the study of computer programming through ludic problems. Problems that are typically studied within this discipline are similar to those of Recreational Mathematics (RecMat), which sometimes leads to the confusion of these two disciplines. The objective for RecPro is to write…

This article describes a probability project used in an upper division, one-semester probability course with third-semester calculus and linear algebra prerequisites. The student learning outcome focused on developing the skills necessary for approaching project-sized math/stat application problems. These skills include appropriately defining…