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Math Arts Project Write-up

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  Our group members are: Eric, David, and Henry. For this project, we choose Caroline Bowen's 2026 artwork <y, x> . This artwork is a 30 x 45.5 cm drawing made with gesso, coloured pencil, and graphite pencil. Bowen describes it has a revisiting of a series of vector field drawing that she made in 2019. What interested us most about the origin of the artwork was Bowen's decision to create the vector field manually. She calculated the direction of each vector using a handheld calculator, and then drew each vector individually on a grid of circles made from a compass. She describes this process as creating a sense of "mathematical intimacy" with mathematics that we would normally let computers calculate for us. To remake the artwork, we approached the process in the opposite direction. Instead of calculating and drawing every vector by hand due to a lack of time, we used MATLAB to generate the vector field using Main.m and  Regenerate_graph.m . Main.m  allows the ...

Battleground Schools

 Learning about the conflict between the Conservative and the Progressive Mathematics Education format were pretty interesting. North American Mathematics had shifted between the Conservative and the Progressive Perspectives. Traditionalist perspectives focus on rote memorization and standarized testings. The Progressive perspectives focus on conceptual understanding and inquiry-based learning. ' I was surprised by the "inquiry-based" learning methods where students face a mathematical problems, form hypotheses, and experiment to see if you can solve the problem. The student must approach a mathematics problem like a science problems.  However, it was interesting to learn that this movement fails because of the math phobia across society. This "math phobia" exists among Mathematics teacher as well. Many Mathematics teachers themselves are "secretly afraid" of math. Hence, they naturally resort to the conservative Mathematics formula, passing down this ...

What is meant by "Curriculum"?

 I was really surprised by and never realized how long student spent in classroom. Students spend over 12,000 hours in school from childhood to graduation, which was a long period of time. Elementary and Highschool students attended school from 9:00AM to 3:00PM for classes as well as other afterschool programs or socializations in school. To these students, schools were their entire life from K-12. Students were pretty much socialized by the school system for their entire childhood. School was the environment that most people grew up with. Hence, school curriculum was incredibly important for the student's values, expectations, and behaviors.  It was also worth noting that Grades were crucial in student's learning. Grades were a commodities for the students which gave them a sense of accompliations that reward them for their works. The whole points of grades were competitions. Students receive a sense of reward from beating their peers. Likewise, althetic league also...

First Mathematics Puzzles

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 I solve this Mathematics puzzle using Python Jupyter notebook. Using a few lines of code that simulate the opening and closing actions of the lockers I found these lockers that would be closed, while the rest of the lockers would be opened.  Below are my codes for the problem:  I first make a list of 1000 entry in Python to denote each locker space. I denote 0 is open and 1 is closed.  Then, I wrote a double for-loop to simulate the actions of each student from 1 to 1000 opening and closing their respective lockers. The outer for-loop loop through each student from 1 to 1000. The inner for-loop loop model every student closing and opening their respective lockers. Then, we simulate the result and print out the lockers that are closed. The rest of the lockers would be opened. 

Introspective writing: Favourite and least favourite math teachers

 One of my favourite math teacher is a teacher at my secondary school who taught me for Math 9, Math 11, and Math 12. Personally, I like this teacher because his teaching style is direct and easy to follow. He would just write the topics, theorem, questions directly on the blackboard or overhead projector and guide us though each of the question. I like him because I personally prefer clean and direct instructions, especially in Mathematics. My least favourite Mathematics teacher is one I had for Grade 8 Math in Secondary School. In class, this teacher would make different classroom activities and make students work with other students in questions. The classroom would get quite chaotic at times when people move around and there isn't a set theorems or informations to follow. I feel like I couldn't learn so well in such a chaotic environment. 

Skemp Reading Reflections

 The first thing which interests me is the differences between the  Instrumental Understanding and  Relational Understanding.  Instrumental Understanding is only knowing how to do a problem while relational understanding is learning why it works. In learning mathematics, even among University courses, many students only have instrumental understanding because there is simply too much concepts to cover and there isn't enough time.  What caught my attention is why instrumental understanding is commonly taught. Skemp mentions that Instrumental Understanding is commonly taught because i t is often easier and faster for students to grasp initially.  It provides immediate rewards for a struggling student's confidence. Moreover, i n specific, isolated scenarios, instrumental understanding can be a faster way to get a reliable answer. Instrumental learning taught you how you do it instead of why you do it.  However, Skemps also says the benefits to  ...

Hello World

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Hello everyone。 你的胆子真的肥嘟嘟的。