Participant Testimonials

Apr 01 - Apr 03, 2016

I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to work with many different mathematicians from any different organizations. There were many insights and ideas shared. I really appreciated ideas that showed math in many contexts such as building, making, creating, exploring. Seeing number as an amount and in a three dimensionality as magnitude was a new understanding. As well, the website shared by the Alberta Regional Consortium: http://learning.arpdc.ab.ca/course/view.php?id=351 will be extremely helpful to teachers to understand the curriculum, to understand common vocabulary with definitions and to have resources to help teach it. As well, having a section for parents is very helpful to give them ideas for what to do at home with their children. Tying all the activities, vocabulary, and resources to the Alberta Math Curriculum is also very helpful. Thank you for this opportunity and it would be wonderful to get together again to further our discussions and further our knowledge.

Kathy Hall teacher
James Short Memorial School, Calgary Board of Education

Participation in this workshop helped me to identify strong connections between the mathematics curriculum and approaches such as Maker Space and Design Thinking. These connections are usually not explicit in the curriculum and, with the help of participating teachers, we found some emphasis on the very notion of number that should be addressed explicitly in the early years to develop a more complete notion of number. Numbers are used for many purposes and with diverse meanings. The current curriculum stresses the meaning of number as quantity (e.g. number of objects in a set). However, other meanings for number related to magnitudes are scarcely addressed in the early years (K to 4). Examples of these meaning are length, height, volume, and time. While for experts (adults) these differences are barely noticed, it might be very confusing to switch from one meaning to other for learners. These meanings of number related to magnitudes are actually useful for making or creating real artifacts, representing a strong connection to Computational Thinking, Design Thinking, and Maker Spaces. The discussion with teachers during the workshop served to identify explicitly learning outcomes where the notion of number as magnitude could be stressed. For instance, when learning to count, students can engage in actions such as walking to count the number of steps in a path. This action is very different than pointing with the finger to count objects in a set -- number is length in the former case and quantity in the later.

Paulino Preciado Babb Dr.
Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary