I've always wondered about how to get more kids into mathematics. I've even thought about writing math books aimed at children. To do that I want to read the existing literature out there. Let's compile kids' books and resources about teaching math
No age range, but the main target should be elementary school. By high school there is already a formed opinion about math in the kids' minds. Also it tends to be that the kids who do not like math in high school don't have a good enough background to be invested in math even if they do end up developing an interest.
https://www.math.brown.edu/~res/Farm/RGB.pdf
Life on the Infinite Farm
A creepy-cool book about infinity
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/Pre-Algebra.pdf
Pre-algebra (grades 6-8) content presented in a rigorous way
Intended for teachers mostly
More readings here
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
Thoughts on pop-math?
Pop-math is not as popular as pop-science but I've seen teachers use it as motivation for students learning mathematics. For example, Youtube channels focusing on math, artistic expressions of math such as fractals...
For a more experienced mathematics enthusiast this might be considered not "real math" because it is after all about the results rather than the process of doing math.
But for children I can see how the "cool factor" of such things is necessary to build interest.
Putting in "work", into anything, is just not "fun" for kids.
>>30
Are you a teacher?
>>34 I'm a student. I'm considering going into teaching after graduation.
>>35
What made you take such decision?
>>36 I haven't fully decided yet. But I like working with kids and I like math. Although I'm technically in school for computer science, I feel like I can do something more meaningful with my life if I go into teaching, even if my own quality of life would substantially decrease.
teach the kids with real world examples.
suppose you worked on a crematory and received a costumer wanting to burn 6 million bodies in 5 years, you would have to calculate if you can provide him the service with your limited number of furnaces.
first we calculate the amount of time necessary, and since the demand is huge, we put people to work 24 hours/day, even though you may not have enough workers for it:
5 years · 365 days/year · 24 hours/day = 43800 hours
then you check how many bodies/hour you will need to burn:
6000000 bodies ÷ 43800 hours = 136.98 bodies/hour
at this moment you start to question if you are going to be able to serve this client, but to be sure, you check if you can distribute the load on 10 furnaces:
136.98 bodies/hour ÷ 10 furnaces = 13.69 (bodies/hour)/furnaces
then you verify the capacity of your furnaces, which for your sorrow, take around 3 hours to burn a single body.
in the end, you call the costumer back and let him know that his request is impossible.
customer!
http://worrydream.com/SimulationAsAPracticalTool/
>>40
>Mathematics, as currently taught, consists of the manipulation of abstract symbols. For most people, the level of abstraction makes math unpleasant or unusable as a practical tool for exploring the problems of their lives.
>The simulations represent the problem concretely, without abstractions; provide a broader context, allowing a deeper understanding of the situation
This is interesting. The way I always saw it was that abstraction is the means by which we make logical thought, and was therefore the most important takeaway from mathematics.
Certainly learning practical applications is necessary as well, but being able to abstract those applications means they can be applied to more (possibly completely unrelated) situations...