Started a new chapter today in our Prealgbra book and the first section was about the Pythagorean theorem. My son had certainly heard about the Pythagorean theorem in our various talks as well as from this fantastic piece from Numberphile:
One of the examples in the section was the proof of the theorem that students usually learn first. We worked through that proof with numbers initially and followed up with symbols. At the end of the morning I asked my son to go talk through both approaches.
Prior to these videos, the algebraic approach gave him a little difficulty, so I was interested to hear him talk through that part on his own in the second video.
With numbers:
With symbols (sorry if the thumbnail preview for this video isn’t working – still having that odd problem occasionally) :
I was definitely happy that we was able to work through both of these examples mostly on his own. After we finished up the last video we rewatched the old Numberphile video for some additional fun!
Mike's Math Page 