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Category: Other MLC stuff

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This is a photo of the entrance to my Maths Learning Centre. What do you notice?

There are many many things to notice in that photo, and if you ever want to ask me about any of them, please do. Today, the thing I want to focus your attention on is the empty space right at […]

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Changing the goal of the Numbers game

I conscripted the game Numbers and Letters seven years ago to help promote the Maths Learning Centre and the Writing Centre at university events like O’Week and Open Day. Ever since then, it has always bothered me how free and easy participation in the Letters game is, while the Numbers game is much less so. […]

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The MLC Date Blocks

This blog post is about a piece of the MLC learning environment which is very special to me: the date blocks. It’s a set of nine blocks that can be arranged each day to spell out the day of the week, the day number, and the month. I love changing them when I set up […]

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Tutorials for an intro Arts course: Story makes sense of number

The Story
Sometime in the past, I was approached by academics in the Faculty of Arts to discuss the numeracy skills of the students in their faculty. They wanted to discuss how they might include numeracy skills in some of their courses across all the degrees they teach. It was a lot bigger than the MLC […]

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Numbers and Letters

Since 2013, the MLC and Writing Centre have been doing a game called Letters and Numbers at Orientation Weeks and Open Days to create interaction with people. I tweeted a photo of one of our sessions during Open Day yesterday and it has attracted a lot of attention, so I thought I might record some […]

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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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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, […]

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A public health approach to improving teaching and learning

Making a big difference to student learning is a tricky business. Here at my university, there are a certain number of (wonderful) teaching staff who are champions of innovation, always making big changes to the way they do things and jumping onto any innovation as soon as it comes around. Yet the students not in […]

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A Day of Maths 5: Looking at Maths Art

This is the fifth in a series of posts coming from my Maths Day in a Year 7 classroom. So far I’ve talked about the following:

how awesome the day was
how I implemented Quarter the Cross
the unexpected things that happened with Zero Zeros
how I implemented Spotless Dice

You may be thinking by this stage, “David, how much […]

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