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Monthly Archives: July 2018

Ten years

On the 23rd of July 2008, I started my first day as coordinator of the Maths Learning Centre at the University of Adelaide. Today is the 23rd of July 2018 — the ten year anniversary of that first day. (Well, it was the 23rd of July when I started writing this post!)
So much has happened in […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, How people learn (or don't), Isn't maths cool?, Other MLC stuff | Tagged , , |

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The TMC attitude

I think this will be my last post about Twitter Math Camp (TMC), getting in just before the TMC18 officially starts (though a lot of people are already there tweeting their TMC-eve adventures even as I write).
TMC is a truly remarkable conference, as I have described before, both in 2016 when I wasn’t there, and […]

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TMC Crochet Coral Quietness

Here is another blog post in my series of only-a-year-late posts about Twitter Math Camp 2017 (TMC17). In this one I want to talk about the Crochet Coral workshops Megan and I did, but I don’t want to actually talk about the crochet coral. Instead I want to talk about the quietness.
TMC was a wild wild […]

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My Favourite is my favourite

A year ago, I went to Twitter Math Camp (TMC) and it was a wonderful experience. TMC is a great conference full of all sorts of opportunities for maths teachers to learn from each other in many ways. The one way I like the best out of all the possibilities is “My Favourite”.
My Favourite is […]

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Fairy Bread

Fairy bread, in case you don’t know, is an Australian children’s party food.

Here’s how to make fairy bread: take white bread, spread it with margarine, and sprinkle with hundreds and thousands. Now cut into triangles and serve.
Notes:

It has to be white bread. If you try to make fairy bread with wholemeal bread, or multigrain bread, […]

Posted in One Hundred Factorial, Other MLC stuff | Tagged , |

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The Human Galton Board

Last week we were booked in to do Human Markov Chains with several groups of school students, but it turned out there would be a lot fewer of them than we expected, and I didn’t think Human Markov Chains would work very well with under 20 students. I still dearly wanted to do a moving […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, Isn't maths cool? | Tagged , |

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Human Markov Chains

This blog post is about a moving maths activity that I have wanted to do for years and finally got an opportunity to do this year in 2018. It’s a model of a concept called a “Markov Chain” using human movement.
In a Markov chain, there is a thing that can be in any number of […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, Isn't maths cool? | Tagged , |

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