Life, Learning, and Enlightenment

I often find myself working with clients for whom math is their most difficult subject. Usually, this is because the teacher isn’t reaching them due to differences between how most math is presented and how these students learn.

The educational service center in Southwest Georgia has compiled quite a collection of graphic organizers from the teachers in their service area and have posted them online for us all to benefit from.

Take a look at their Mathematics Page to see what might benefit you!

When teaching electronics, students often find themselves wishing that they could practice more outside of class. This is often difficult due to the equipment required to build and measure electronic circuits.

The University of Colorado has developed a library of interactive simulations that run in any java enabled browser. There are simulations covering a variety of math and science related topics, including electronics.

For our purposes, there are a variety of circuit related simulations that can be used to build both AC and DC circuits. There are also some interesting simulations for learning Ohm’s Law and for working with resistance in a wire.

Best of all, you can use these tools online or download them to use any time. All you need is a good web browser with Java enabled!

     

Some students have problems visualizing the application of Ohm’s Law and the equations for voltage, current, resistance, and power. If you work best with visuals, or if you’d just like a place to check your work*, take a look at the Ohm’s Law Calculators available at http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/page2.asp.

*The use of these tools to get homework and practice answers will not help make you smarter or promote understanding! Do your own work first!

Last week, I started teaching a new semester of basic electronics at St. Philips College. The first thing we talk about is scientific notation as it applies to metric notation. As part of my teaching process, I build a number line to visually illustrate the relationships between the powers of ten and their metric equivalent.

This time, one of my students, David Solfest, shared the mnemonic that he learned for the negative exponents and made up a new one for the positive exponents.

On the positive exponent side of the number line, reading from left to right, the mnemonic is “Ten (Tera) Grey (Giga) Mountain (Mega) kats (kilo).” Moving to the negative exponent side of the number line you have “my (milli) mom (micro) nits (nano) pelts (pico).”

For some, just memorizing the number line is enough to promote storage of this information in long term memory, but others need something like the mnemonic devices that David came up with. Either way, this is a great tool for learning the different values associated with metric notation!

Here’s a cool tool for checking that large number multiplication or division. Its a MS Excel spreadsheet set up to do either multiplication or division. I don’t, of course, advocate the use of this tool instead of working the problem yourself, but its a good way to check your work.

This MS Excel spreadsheet should work fine with open source alternatives that can open and edit .xls files, including OpenOffice.org and Gnumeric.

Just click on the screenshot below to download the spreadsheet in .zip format, ready to decompress and use!

I was searching for some help and additional information on factoring polynomials for a client last night and found three websites that I thought I would share.

ThinkQuest is a place where teachers and students can go to build their own information sources. I didn’t spend a lot of time learning about who they are and what they do, but one section of the site is called Math for Morons, and it has some really good info on the topic I was searching at http://library.thinkquest.org/20991/alg2/polyf.html.

I also found a cool source of FREE Mathematics tutorials and worksheets at http://www.analyzemath.com/.

Finally, the West Texas A&M Universtity has a Virtual Math Lab that contains some interesting and helpful information.

Please leave feedback via comment or the Question Form and let me know how these resources worked for you and your algebra issues.

When my kids were trying to learn the states and capitals in middle school, I stumbled across Wakko’s America. Since then, Yakko has gotten in on the fun with his own songs about the world and the universe.

Just click on the links to listen or download them for yourself or your kids!

A client was recently studying Macbeth in her high school English class, but was having some trouble with it. Since she is an auditory learner, I found the play in MP3 format for her.

You can download the play for yourself below:

Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Act 4
Act 5