This week I’m going to be giving a talk at the math camp at Williams college. The talk this year is going to be based on an amazing paper cutting project that I learned from James Tanton’s book Solve This: As that tweet from 2016 suggests, we’ve looked at these paper cutting ideas before: An … Continue reading Revisiting James Tanton’s paper cutting exercise
I saw a really neat tweet from James Tanton yesterday: The video in the “setting the scene” link is terrific and I had my younger son watch it this morning. I can’t figure out how to get the video to embed, so here’s a direct link to the page it is on: James Tanton’s area … Continue reading Sharing James Tanton’s area models with my younger son
Today we revisited one of my all time favorite math projects for kids (also **revisiting**) : We did this project once before, but I don’t think the kids remembered it: An absolutely mind blowing project from James Tanton The project is relatively simple to set up – you have strips of paper and make 5 … Continue reading James Tanton’s incredible Möbius strip cutting project
I saw a neat tweet from James Tanton yesterday: After seeing the tweet, I couldn’t wait to do the project today. It turned out to be much more difficult than I was expecting, though. One of the difficulties that really caught me off guard was the time it took to make accurate measurements of the … Continue reading James Tanton’s penny and dime exercise
I didn’t have an specific project planned for today and was lucky enough to see a really neat problem posted by James Tanton: I didn’t show the tweet to the boys because I thought finding the patterns would be a good exercise for kids. We started with the k = 0 case. This case is … Continue reading Exploring a neat problem from James Tanton
Yesterday we looked at a really neat problem James Tanton posted last week: That project is here: Working through a challenging counting problem from James Tanton Our first look at the question involved some dice rolling and a computer simulation. Today we are going to look at an exact solution to the problem. That solution … Continue reading James Tanton’s counting problem part 2
I saw a neat problem from James Tanton during the week: A follow up post from Amy Hogan made me realize that I should use the problem for a project: So, I decided to make looking at this problem our weekend project. Today I wanted to try a few simulations. Tomorrow we’ll count the cases. … Continue reading Working through a challenging counting problem from James Tanton
Saw a really cool tweet from James Tanton today: Tonight I sat down with the boys to make sure they understood the problem. They noticed that half the numbers would have no powers of two – good start! After that observation they started down the path to solving the problem really quickly. In fact, my … Continue reading A nice problem about primes for kids from James Tanton
A little over 2.5 years ago I saw this very neat question from James Tanton: The question led to a really fun – and also one of our first – 3d printing projects: James Tanton’s geometry problem and 3d printing We’ve now got a few more years of 3d printing under our belts and a … Continue reading Revisiting James Tanton’s Tetrahedron problem
I was flipping through James Tanton’s Solve This last night and found a project I thought would be fun. I had no idea! We’ve done a few paper cutting projects before. For example: Cutting a double Mobius strip Tadashi Tokieda’s “World from a Seeht of Paper” lecture Our one cut project Fold and cut project … Continue reading An absolutely mind blowing project from James Tanton
