One of the exciting benefits of our new math program is the relationship we’ve developed with Jo Boaler and the staff at YouCubed.org.  It’s been wonderful to get their validation of what we are doing and to have the opportunity to present at their Mathematical Mindsets conferences.  Kristina Levesque and I were invited back this past September to share out at their leadership conference about the changes we are making in how we teach our girls math.

While it is always wonderful to connect with other math educators, the best part of presenting at this conference is being able to take advantage of this professional development without having to pay the $1,000 per person fee.  😁  Every time we’ve attended this conference we have been able to take away something else that we can implement in our program.

This past conference we had the opportunity to play with a math problem involving a series of four figures of different dots.

With all YouCubed problems we were asked what do we wonder about each figure shown and what conjectures can we make for the the number of dots in figure 100.  Kristina and I loved playing around with the dots and developing an equation to determine what figure 100 would look like (without drawing that figure!).  We knew this would fit well into Topic 9 of our Algebra curriculum.  We added it in as a Topic Challenge and love that it shows students a visual representation of a quadratic equation.  One of the main takeaways from this conference was that engaging with math in multiple ways is so important for learning.  When we can add in the visual representation it can become a status equalizer.  Students at different levels can contribute and engage with the problem which is so important.  Our goal is to incorporate more visual representations in our math program and one of our plans moving forward is to find a visual for as many units as possible.

Now it’s your turn.  How many dots do you think will be in figure 100?  What would the figure look like?