| Answers to Excursion 1 at the bottom of this page. About the Newton's Window Weekly Math Challenge
Getting Started
Excursion 1
Take me back to "go"... |
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Because we have to teach so much "content" in math
classes in schools, parents and students often miss an essential thing about math
learning: it requires thinking. Not just a quick learning of procedures and
facts, but getting into problems and grappling our way to solutions, using anything and
everything we know. That's math. Sweating with our brains. Struggling
forward when we can't find an easy answer.
One of the best ways to help kids in math is to let them know this is not only normal,
but essential. One of the best ways to counteract math anxiety is to give them
experience with this, in comfortable environments, and do it with them. It's okay if
you don't know "the math." Because that's how we can help augment school
math the most - not to teach content, but to model methods for struggling with the
content.
Many of our excursions are designed to do just that. Like this week's......
You have to boil an egg for exactly 15 minutes, but you have no watch or clock.
You have only a 7-minute and an 11-minute hourglass. How can you time exactly
15 minutes using just these two hourglasses?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Answers to Excursion 1: To Younger students question: 377,
610, 987, 1597.
To Older students question: 1, 2, 1.5,
1.666666667, 1.6, 1.625, 1.615384615,
1.619047619, 1.617647059, 1.618181818,
1.617977528, 1.618055556, 1.618025751,
1.618037135 ...
These successive ratios of Fibonacci numbers get closer and closer to the Golden
Mean: 1.618033989. |
