- Self-serve, pick and choose which tasks to complete
- OR, complete and submit tasks and receive (free) a digital certificate of completion
- In collaboration with the STEAM3D Research Lab and Convergence.tech
What is AI? Where is it taking us? Where do we want to go?
1. AI
- Workshop available at AI workshop
Math you want to talk about
WONDER Math Workshops, for students, teachers and parents, will prepare you to answer the question:
“What did you do in math today?”
in ways that elicit mathematical surprise and conceptual insight.
1. INFINITY + LIMIT
- Workshop available at Infinity + Limit
2. GROWING PATTERNS
- Workshop available at growing patterns
3. BINARY CHOICE
- Workshop available at binary-choice
WORKSHOP DESIGN
- self-serve
- pick and choose tasks to complete in each Workshop
- OR submit tasks for a Workshop for a free digital credential & a free math resource
- low floor (minimal prerequisite knowledge) and a high ceiling (different representations and more complex relationships)
- hands-on engagement
- coding extensions
- historical contexts
- interviews with mathematicians
- multimodal presentation
Workshop USE
- Students
- catching up on math learning missed due to Covid
- experiencing conceptual surprise and insight
- enrichment
- Teachers
- professional learning
- student activities for online or f2f classrooms
- Parents
- awareness
The Math Wonder Workshops are designed by George Gadanidis (Western University), based on his many years working as an educator, education leader and university researcher, and through his lengthy collaboration with colleagues Marcelo Borba (UNESP, Brazil), Janette M. Hughes (Ontario Tech University), Immaculate Namukasa (Western University) and Ricardo Scucuglia (UNESP, Brazil).
Problem
I used to do a lot of math workshops for parents, and when I asked “What is your favourite math story?” the typical response was one of confusion.
How is it possible that we study school math for ten or more years and we can't talk about it? What were we doing all that time?
As a society, we lack a tradition, and a knowledge base, for sharing good math stories.
These free, self-serve WONDER Workshops are a first step to sharing and learning math stories that offer mathematical surprise and conceptual insight.
Where math comes from
Funded by the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, we hosted a number of International Math Symposia at Western University, where we had the pleasure of inviting very insightful speakers.
Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake (author of Homo Aestheticus: where art comes from and why) spoke of the human biological necessity to experience, share and learn from surprising events.
Brian Boyd (University of Aukland; author of On the origin of stories: evolution, cognition, and fiction) spoke about the human necessity for storytelling and that telling a good story involves artistic discovery.
Experiencing math as something to wonder about, something that is surprising and insightful, something we can and want to talk about, and share as a story, in not a frill. It’s a necessity.
If math is not something to wonder about, something that is surprising and insightful, something we can and want to talk about, and share as a story, then humans would not have spent millenia creating it and playing with it.
Readings
Gadanidis, G., Borba, M., Hughes, J. and Lacerda, H. (2016). Designing aesthetic experiences for young mathematicians: A model for mathematics education reform. International Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 6(2), 225-244.
Blog posts by George Gadanidis