Skillwise – BBC

by: Algebra Funsheets - November 6th, 2011   Add Comment

skillwise

BBC produces many quality math education videos and movies.  Unfortunately, most of their sites utilize a video player that is not portable for the U.S. (???)  But I found this Skillwise site that can be used in the U.S.

I’ve sifted through and linked some of the videos directly in my Funsheets4math site, but they have a greater selection so I thought I’d post their link so you can sift through them as well.

I really like these because they’re only about 1 minute clips that make a good introduction or conclusion to a lesson.

Math Snacks

by: Algebra Funsheets - November 4th, 2011   Add Comment

logo_mathsnacks
Here’s an interesting site that has a few math videos, mostly about ratios, scales and proportions. These are actually decent videos in regards to graphics (compared to other math videos), but I found the content a little basic. Each video comes with a teacher guide and student handout, which might be useful.

Math Snacks

The site also has two math games. The monster school bus game is probably more of an elementary school game, but the pearl diver game seemed fairly decent.

Pearl Diver is a game for graphing numbers on a number line. It does start out basic, with a number line from 0 to 5, but then it goes to -5 to +5, and then starts incorporating fractions. It also has a “cutting sushi” stage where you have to cut an eel in halves or thirds. I didn’t play long enough to know for certain, but I bet the fractions keep incrementing so that you have to cut the eel into fourths, fifths and so on.

And, like their videos, the graphics on Math Snacks games are better than most math “games” you find online.

Get the Math

by: Algebra Funsheets - October 26th, 2011   Add Comment

Getthemath
I was pretty excited when I saw that they were going to make a new show about math in the real world. The series is called Get the Math, and so I immediately went to their site to see what they had to offer. There are, so far, three videos. One is about fashion, one about music and the one I watched was about math in video games.

Since I only watched one video, you can assume that I was very disappointed. The video took five or ten minutes (I can’t remember how long it was) to very generally say “we use math to make video games.” They spend most of the time talking about how they get ideas for new games, and the creative process in general, but not much about math. They do comment on the coordinate plane and linear equations, but only briefly, and only because they made a very 80-ish looking video game just for this video so that they could mention the coordinate plane and linear equations. Since I have some programming experience, and am quite a nerd as well, I know there’s a lot more math going on in the background.

Take, for instance, the Pokemon games. Here is a tiny piece of the algorithm used just to determine whether a pokeball will catch a pokemon (I have four kids…).

Catch_formula_2

I think they water these math shows down way too much.

I’ll end up taking a peek at the other two videos, but I really do wish these shows would consider hiring a math teacher as a consultant to tell them what math teachers really need.

**Okay, so I decided to give it another go and watched the fashion one. Not much math there, but I thought the industry standard of a 220% markup was interesting, that fact may come in handy for a future activity…