EXPLODING DOTS all live lessons all year long.
Check out our events calendar!
Dear Math Friends:
This past month the Global Math Project conducted its fourth annual Global Math Week, October 10 – 17 (a generous week!). And joyous mathematics certainly did resound around the planet.
Despite the uncertainty of these times, full of obstacle and challenge, teachers and students nonetheless engaged in the magic mathematics can offer.
It was a respite from the difficulties of the times, said one educator, just to see the pure joy of math.
Students—and parents too!—were absorbed
[They are] so absorbed in your brain-melting [Global Math Lesson] they don’t notice when class ends!
So, I understand you can use Cuisenaire rods to do calculations, but my son has decided on a very strange way to do that.
I don’t know whether to thank you or not. I started off on Exploding Dots with my 9yo (who likes weird maths stuff). Quickly I was hooked and I had to show my husband. FROM LEFT TO RIGHT?! WHY? HOW? Now I can’t stop!
This year, the Global Math Project collaborated with the National Museum of Mathematics to offer each day of Global Math Week, live Zoom lessons covering the entire Exploding Dots story. Over 300 folk attended the sessions each day, many being classrooms of students from the U.S. and overseas. In addition to this, the Mathematical Association of America offered daily live “Puzzles Explained by Exploding Dots” with middle-schoolers across the globe, and Dexter Learning conducted a special Dexter.Live session on Exploding Dots.
But, of course, the joy of mathematics is not confined to a single week, no matter how “generous” that week might be! It really is a year-long, year-to-year, lifelong relationship one has with math joy.
In September, we launched a pilot program to see if we could provide Exploding Dots joy all year long. We are thrilled to share that we had such an enthusiastic response to the pilot and to GMW 2020 that we will indeed be running these programs for all the months to come! We will finish out 2020 with newly minted lessons 7, 8 and a bonus lesson 9. And a new session will begin in January, starting with Exploding Dots Lesson 1. Check out mathcommunities.org if you personally, or your entire class, would like to join a lesson. (Have a break. Let us teach a class for you!) The Global Math Project is also conducting special versions of these lessons for individual middle-schools and high-schools. A lot of dots are happening!
Mathematics is an uplifting human enterprise that truly unites us all. And again, Global Math Week 2020, proved to be such lovely testimony to this.
Thank you for your participation and contribution to the math joy!
– James, and the GMP team.