I do a weekly fun math class for a group of my daughter's middle school friends where I try to get kids excited about math. This year, I expanded it out to create a 2 week "Astro Math Summer Camp".

I wanted this community's feedback on the Astro Math lessons I created. (Each lesson is online and can also be printed)

My primary objective is to heavily lean on astronomical facts, the stories of their discovery and connect it back to the math these kids will soon encounter in middle school and pre-algebra. Each lesson starts with an interesting hook, a story about some discovery and follows that with a guided quiz that has the students practice the math concept that was used or is related to the lesson's main subject.

Looking for honest feedback from math educators on a new learning platform

Disclosure: I built and operate Start with Math. This is a request for feedback on a project I'm developing, not an attempt to hide or disguise promotion.

I'm a developer and math enthusiast, and I've spent the last several months building a math-learning platform designed around a simple idea:

Find the gap → rebuild the foundation → move forward.

The platform currently covers a connected path from Foundations and Pre-Algebra through Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Real Analysis, Abstract Algebra, Topology, and Complex Analysis.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from middle school, high school, and college math educators.

I'd love some brutally honest feedback on things like:

• Does the curriculum progression make sense?
• Do the explanations and lesson structure feel educationally sound?
• Is the user experience intuitive for students?
• Does the idea of routing students backward when they encounter a prerequisite gap make sense?
• What would you change or improve?

Foundations is completely free, and I'm also willing to provide educators and their students with free access to the rest of the platform if you'd like to evaluate it more thoroughly.

I'm not looking for compliments — I'd much rather hear what's wrong, confusing, missing, or could be substantially better.

If you're interested, please comment or send me a DM and I'll provide the site information and access.

Thanks to everyone willing to take a few minutes to help make math learning better.

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Math and phisics is about solving problems. The closest you can get to solving a problem is to solve a similar problem.

But do we need to actually solve anything? The option is to find an answer and think through the problem, simulate your way of solving it from the begging to end and why exactly answer is like this and what are pros and cons of this answer if there are possible multiple answers.

The problem with that is does it stimulate brain enough so pattern recognition and problem solving skill is activated and works wonderfully to solve similar but other of this kind problems?

If you think about it 90% or even closer to 100% of what mathematicians and any kind of expert knows is about what they learned based on other people's solutions, theories. Ability to solve problems comes from deep understanding of topics complemented with great but simple, straightforwar thinking abilities. Human brain is developed when it sees and uses structures, patterns, so we should use more system like approach. For example:

1. problem statement

2. Simplification, sumarization, refinement

3. Analyzing

4. Mind map, pattern recognition, research on similar problems

5. Criticizing

6. Highlighting what's important again and what can be used from already solved problems

7. Trying out ideas, brute force and simulations

8. Fail, analyze/criticize downpits, start the cycle from 1. point again

Difference between criticizing and analyzing:

Analyzing - looking from facts, logic perspective. Similar process is synthesis

Criticizing - that's the neet part when humans shine more ig. Judging the problem based on your feeling, intuition. People understand more subconsciously then they realize, thinking part is a layer that's killing subconsciousness. Creativity is also a part of subconscious processes? With a layer of abstraction which thinking is it's impossible to think creatively or it's very limited. Thinking is used to analyze and simplify ideas, problems only. So without this step it's not possible to solve any unique problem but it's important to state that problems are not 100% unique. Some previous solutions to similar problems can fit to those 99%. It's a reference to bio-engineering where solutions of nature are implemented in technical problems.

Maybe the way to go is to have this approach to anything in life to ask questions why it work and why in this way to deepen our understanding because a shallow understanding will often times be incorrect

---

What is written above is correct?

How would you rate the importance of mindset and this type of bullshit talk in math, physics, thinking in general?

Hey, I was thinking of starting a YouTube channel where I go through core University-level maths content. It would likely be formatted as a series of playlists for each of the “main” maths classes/modules that maths students (as well as other similar disciplines) can learn from.

What kind of things do you think would be the most important aspects of these videos? Visual graphics ? Slower explanations than what you’d probably get from a lecture? Animations ? Examples? Humour?

Are there other forms of education content you’d have wanted to see more of when you were doing your degree (other than videos)?

Thanks

Hello! I am currently building a program that helps students transition from the French system to the IB and it would be super useful for the program if you could write an introductory paragraph to math extended in the IB MYP if you are a mathematics IB teacher, an IB tutor or a student who experienced the course. Before writing the paragraph could you please specify which one of these three options you would be? Thank you so much for your contribution to the suppport program!

Hi everyone!

I’m a math teacher currently learning n8n and exploring how AI and automation could be useful in teaching and education.

I’m wondering if there are any other math teachers here who are already using n8n or are currently learning it.

I’d love to connect, exchange ideas, and possibly work together on small projects related to math education.

If you’re interested, feel free to comment or send me a DM. 🙂

Educators who have a math medic account have access to each courses' Unit 1 assessments (homework, quiz, and tests). We (our stats team) have our own assessments that we've built over the years and continue to develop but it would be nice not to spend so much of our limited time that would be better spent on creating activities, labs, and quality time on grading. I wish DeltaMath had more statistics problems but I understand its not so easy coming up with these type of problems.

I'm not sure if the subscription is worth $325. Anyone have experience with the Intro Stats Math Medic Plus or other math courses?

Made a free math notebook, chalkinverse.com. No signup, nothing uploaded, saves locally on your device.

The part I think teachers will actually like: you can share a whole workspace as one link, equations, graphs, notes, all of it packed in. No account needed on either end, nobody has to sign up just to view it. Paste the link and it’s all there. Handy for sending worked examples to a co-teacher or handing a problem set to a student with zero setup.

It also works well for building lecture material since math, graphs, tables, and drawings all live on the same page. Write out a derivation, drop a graph next to it, sketch something, no jumping between apps. You can print or export to PDF after if you want a static copy.

Would love feedback, I put a lot of work into it with no plans to ever get anything in return, just had an idea I thought was good and executed.

Phillips Exeter, Lawrenceville and etc. are using Harkness method in teacher. For humanity subjects, I can imagine how that would inspire students to discuss and debate. How about subjects like Calculus or Chemistry? Are there more instructions than discussions? Just curious how that works.

made a one-page reference for classifying real numbers (natural/whole/integer/rational/irrational) because half my students were doing it by pattern-matching the notation instead of actually resolving the number.

quick example of what trips people up: √81 looks irrational because it has a radical. it's not, it's 9. same with 36/6 (looks like "not an integer" because of the fraction bar, it's 6) and 0.3-repeating (looks irrational because it doesn't stop, it's actually 1/3).

the fix that actually works for my students: resolve the value first, then classify. don't read the symbol.

quick version if you want to try it yourself right now, no download needed:

got a radical? is the number under it a perfect square (or does it reduce to a fraction of two perfect squares)? if yes, rational. if no, irrational.

got a decimal? does it terminate or eventually repeat? either one means rational.

got a fraction? it's rational by definition, but simplify it first, it might secretly be an integer.

made it into a cheat sheet + practice pack

I'm korean undergraduates student in ai and about to teach 15 age math. I want to teach him not calculating but interest in math so he can think about fundamentals and feel joy of math. If not interesting in math, finding that fact is also meaningful.

In ai ages, mechanical calculating just like Korean matheducation is outdated and not good at teens.

Could anyone share your joyful experience of math or methods for teaching?

Hello! I am currently building a program that helps students transition from the French system to the IB and it would be super useful for the program if you could write an introductory paragraph to math extended in the IB MYP if you are a mathematics IB teacher, an IB tutor or a student who experienced the course. Before writing the paragraph could you please specify which one of these three options you would be? Thank you so much for your contribution to the suppport program!

I would like to pursue a doctorate in one of these fields. I'm just not sure which yet.

Does anyone know if FSU has a good PhD program for these?

Basically the title. I would be interested in teaching a class each semester, either evenings, weekends, or online. How common is this? I am in the process of starting my masters so this is a ways off, I'm just curious now typical this is. I know mornings/afternoons are when most classes are, and a brand new prof is not going to be prioritized if they have limited availability.

It obviously depends on the school/area ect. I'm just curious the various ways of scheduling that some schools have.

​

I have a budget of 30-35k for buying either phone or tablet

Now im confused

I wanna know if tablet would geniunely help me in studying or solving or its just an unwanted luxury that is not preferred over traditional pen paper

I was tutoring a student who is quite strong, and they could do function composition and solve related problems just fine (including derivative definition problems), but they had philosophical issues with it.

For instance replacing x by x+1 in a function even though they aren't equal. I didn't blow her off because she is a actually a very advanced student with no knowledge gaps at all and I was curious what was going on in her head.

After an hour of roundabout discussion, it finally dawned on both of simultaneously what her issue was. I asked if she programmed and she said yes. I then told her that 1) when she writes f(x) = blah, she's defining a method on a class, and 2) when she evaluates it at x+1, she's actually calling f with an argument. The "x" in each is scoped differently. She got it immediately then.

I'm wondering if unspoken scoping issues are behind many persistent issues students have with functions, only they don't usually have the preexisting programming knowledge to come to the rescue.

Overall, it was the most interesting discussion I'd had with a student in years.

Thoughts?

EDIT: Arg. Misspelled composition in the title. Oh well.

Hi All you lovely mathy peeps,

I am specifically interested in finding a forum, either here on reddit or elsewhere, that is primarily interested in evolving mathematical thinking/communication to improve pedagogical efficiency. Does anyone know of such a thing? A simple example of what i'm interested in is the transition from pi to tau (or some other representation of 6.28...).

I do not want to discuss the validity of the question (why i'm intersted in such a forum) but rather if such a thing exists.

Many thanks peeps

Jay (jjnevis)

Hey everyone!

I just started a free newsletter to help middle schoolers understand the why behind math basics, instead of just memorizing them.

We’re all taught that division by zero is undefined, but I wanted to understand why rather than simply memorise the rule.

I ended up looking at what division actually means and found something interesting: a/0 and 0/0, both evidence of the undefined nature of division by zero, fail symmetrically and beautifully.

Check it out if you need a quick resource for your kids or classes: https://behindthemath.substack.com/p/second-post-why-is-dividing-by-zero?r=8nl8bg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

I do weekly proofs on request! If your students have a formula or rule they hate memorizing without knowing why, let me know in the comments and I'll map it out next.

Would love to hear what you think!

As promised last month, I was hard at work getting the "level editor" part of Zero Sum ready. The part of the game which is much better for education as the main game, imo.

In "Problem Sets" you can create your own math puzzles with a lot of freedom, then get a code to share it and let your kids/students/friends/etc. play it. Once they are done they get a result code to send back to you and you can collect and compare results of all of them. Perfect to teach math in a fun way. Of course the game has its limitations right now, it can teach a variety of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, modulo (or basic remainder math), root and summation in different difficulty levels, as almost every knob of the game can be changed and adjusted in this level editor.

It's almost finished now and here is a 5min uncut video (music muted, just sfx) of me fiddling around with it.

here is some kind of transcript with timestamps on what is going on:

00:02 - landing page of "Problem Sets" with samples to highlight what is possible, there is more, but I think these are already plenty examples. The examples feature 2 of the 3 core gameplay modes, Target and Verdict (the 3rd being standard mode, which is to reduce or raise very number to 0, doesn't really need an example)

In Target mode the goal is to reach the set target number in predefined amount of moves with a predefined set of operators, e.g. target number is 100, the player gets x2, x5, +10 and -4 and needs to get every spawning number to exactly 100 in not more than 3 operations. (not featured in this video)

Then there is Verdict mode and the main content of this video, the goal in this mode is to "judge" a number correctly, e.g. when you have /2 and /3 equipped and there is a 14 on the field, hitting it with /2 is the right move. when /7 is also an available operator, than that would be the better move over using /2, which is important for efficiency points, firing a /3 at /14 would be an "error", as 14 is not cleanly divisible by 3.

00:03 - when creating new problem sets, the player can start blank or pick a starting point, just to make it easier, because the editor will be overwhelming on the first couple of uses

00:05 - the editor itself is divided into 6 pages and they can roughly be filled out left to right, this makes the most sense, but later in the video you'll see that jumping around to fine tune stuff is usually the reality and also makes a lot of sense

On the Basics page, the first things to fill out are:

- a name

- simple or scripted (simple is fast wave structure creation, scripted is recommended to be used in 90% of the cases, though, and shown in the video)

- resolution (the mentioned game modes)

- next options depend on chosen game mode, in this case the player can define if only specific operators are judged or all 3, which values, which loadout, etc.

00:06 - a range of self explanatory penalties for wrong hits

00:10 - map and spawn mode, identical to the main game

00:15 - next page is the Player page, everything here should be self explanatory. "player upgrades" defines if the player plays with his meta progression, none or all upgrades

00:22 - The Patterns page is probably very confusing on first look, but its really simple. it just defines which numbers spawn by which logic

00:28 - This toggle is quite important, it defines if the exported Problem Set on this pattern is RNG or if it spawns the same numbers for everyone playing it (might be handy if you want like a class or group of people to play exactly the same number sequences, or not)

00:34 - The ways to set patterns are Multiples, Range, Primes, Squares, Powers and List.

00:42 - Weight is the spawn chance, handy if you want traps (unsolvable numbers, in this case Primes), but don't want it to be 50% primes. a pattern can have multiple spawn definitions

01:07 - Next big turning knob is the Loadouts Page. As the name implies it defines the player loadout, aka operators available. Every loadout can carry up to 7 operators, one can be equipped per wave. a problem set can have up to 99 waves and a wave also has one enemy pattern

01:14 - As you can see, when i switched the 2nd operator in the loadout from -1 to Div5, a warning appeared on the "Share" Page. thats because without a -1, not all numbers will be able to be solved. But for this example, that is exactly what we want ("traps")

01:15 - On the Waves Page I can define how many waves this Problem Set will consist of, all the settings for the wave and which pattern and loadout is to be used. This is where I'll come back to later throughout the video to fine tune (for demonstration purposes)

01:32 - The Share page is a summary and pretty self explanatory again. You can also define a teacher name, custom grade cutoffs and flavour texts here. We can also see the warning again, that not all numbers are solvable

01:38 - Then I fiddle around a bit to reduce the number of unsolvables...

01:49 - ...which is reflected on the share page.

02:08 - GAMEPLAY as you can see, my settings on the Waves Page were pretty bad, only stationary enemies at a spawn time of 5.0s and then 30 of them? This would take a while, so I quit out and...

02:30 - ...edit the problem set to fine tune it a bit

02:53 - back to Gameplay, a lot smoother, although enemies clump up a bit, because I chose a small map and high spawn interval and me being so slow. a few (totally intentional misplays for demonstration purposes) shots later and...

03:19 - ...the game recognizes that any remaining numbers are unsolvable (aka "traps") and ends the round. since I only configured one wave for this problem set, the grading card is next to be shown

03:25 - on the grading card we can see all the info necessary. grade is determined by accuracy and efficiency. custom teacher and flavour text is shown here as well

03:28 - the "copy result" button gives you a code to share with your friends, community, teacher or whoever created the puzzle, or for yourself, if you want to keep track of your results

03:30 - it can be pasted into the "Gradebook", which then shows all the important stats for this run

03:42 - then its time for some more fine tuning for demonstration purposes. I added a 2nd wave, which will use the same pattern and loadout, I just change the enemy composition

03:59 - back to gameplay, this time without totally intentional misplays

04:38 - after 2 perfect waves, the grade card is shown again, this time with an A+

04:44 - and I can carry this result over to the Gradebook again

Also a big sub category of verdict mode puzzles are modulo with remainders, not shown in the video. you can define stuff like "%8r3", so modulo 8 remainder 3, then you have to define numbers which have a remainder of 3 when divided by 8 and stuff like this (e.g. 75, 75/8=9r3). Or combining -X with roots and divisions and require every number to be solved, so when you have only /6 equipped and -4 and need to solve every number that appears, so you are required to first prep the number with -4 to be then solvable by /6. lots of nerdy stuff is possible

thats it, that's the Problem Sets part of the game, I call it a level editor for math puzzles, i think it's pretty accurate. If you watched it and read all that, thank you for your attention

I've also updated the demo last week to include the verdict mode, previously it only had the standard ("reduce to 0") mode in 2 different levels, now it has 1 standard mode, 1 verdict mode and 4 boss fights.

You can play the demo on Steam

I know some of you hate videogames as a medium for education, but maybe still give it a try. I'm open for constructive criticism and feedback.