Ramesh Kumar thinks math makes a person cool and smart. It’s highly creative, full of fun, logical, and based on reasoning. Many people consider math as nothing more than rote, tedious number crunching, plugging numbers into a formula that they cannot memorize, but it can be beautiful once you understand it. The beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
As a young engineer, Debbie Sterling set out to solve some of society’s big challenges. Now she’s building a special bridge, one that connects girls with a future in engineering. With the help of a wildly successful crowdsourcing campaign she launched GoldieBlox in 2012. Goldieblox provides a much-needed female engineer role model who help s girls develop their spatial skills and build self-confidence in their problem solving abilities.
Dr. Leonisa Ardizzone, Ed.D. Founder and President of Storefront Science in New York City, shares Five Thoughts about Math. As creative and seasoned science educator, she has solid ideas for all parents as well as food for thought for those raising girls.
Bon Crowder, Math Mom and Education Advocate, publishes MathFour and That’s Math to support teachers and parents in their quest to build better math learners. Our most enthusiastic interviewee to date, Bon shared six thoughts about math, suggesting that perhaps the 5 Thoughts about Math could be +/- 1 due to rounding.
Rachel Levy, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, agreed to share five thoughts about math with us. She’s the editor in chief of Grandma got STEM (a site dedicated to grandmothers who work or worked in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math), the Interface Compendium of Student Work, and SIURO, an undergraduate applied mathematics research publication, as well as an associate editor of Math Horizons.
Dan Shapiro is the founder of two software companies, has worked at Microsoft and Google, and is the proud dad of four-year-old boy/girl twins. He’s the creator of Robot Turtles, a tabletop board game that teaches computer programming concepts to kids ages 3-8. Dan uses math as a programmer, a business owner, and as a dad. He generously shared five thoughts about math.
Susan Cahalane, a research scientist turned elementary school science teacher, writes about fun science experiments and activities on her blog, Science for Kids. Today on Add It Up, she shares thoughts on raising kids who love math and being a positive role model for girls.
We’re delighted to welcome Amy Hengerer, founder of Creative Kid Mission, where she shares budget-friendly crafts, games activities, science projects, books, music, field trip and even snack ideas based on weekly themes. Amy not only shares her learning philosophy but two fun math activities she developed just for Add It Up readers.
So what’s all the hoopla in the news about Common Core standards? Last week, New York State announced results for the new Common Core-aligned state tests in Math and English Language Arts (ELA) for grades 3-8. The data showed a big drop in student proficiency rates compared to previous years’ results, leading to a slew of information that can be tough to wade through. Indeed, the results showed that New York City, where only 26.9% of students were proficient in Math and 26.4% in ELA, has its work cut out for it if it is going to prepare its students to be career and college-ready. For Bedtime Math subscribers and readers, we’ll lay out what led to the drop in scores so that parents and educators can have a clear picture of just what the new scores mean.
We’re pleased to present Danielle Woods, one of the Education.com founders, as our first guest in the 5 Thoughts about Math series. In the coming months we’ll feature additional exciting guests sharing their thoughts about math and raising young mathematicians.