I am a math and computer science educator based in NYC. I teach at an independent school in Manhattan.
I have also worked in math ed-tech, helping to create educational activities
at Desmos.
Before switching to K-12 education, I was a cognitive neuroscience faculty member
in a university, teaching and carrying out brain imaging research (publications
here).
I especially enjoy creating interactive math demonstrations and games.
Below are some examples, in Python, Desmos, and javascript.
What makes code or an activity useful for teaching?
In my experience, students tend to find an activity or a piece of code engaging if it is:
- Useful: It does something you might actually want, beyond just illustrating a technique.
- Simple: It doesn't try to be clever, or fancy, or ultra-compressed.
- Visual: Whenever possible, you should be able to understand the code's output at a glance. Desmos animations and PyTurtle are great for this, because you can watch the drawing happening while they run.
- Readable: If a variable's job is to store numbers that have been picked so far, then I'm going to call that variable numbers_picked_so_far, not "n" or anything else brief but cryptic. In a trade-off between clarity and brevity, I'll take clarity every time. And the code should have plenty of comments too, of course.
Some simple tutorial Python code
PyTurtle examples to illustrate math concepts, running in the browser via trinket.io.
Tutorial python code running in the browser via Google Colab.
Desmos activities
Desmos is a really wonderful tool for making interactive math. It's a graphing calculator, but you can do much more with it, including making activities and games. Below are some examples that I've made. More of my Desmos creations can be found here.
Below are a couple of embedded Desmos graphs that I made. The first is a snowflake maker. It can be used for teaching about mirror and rotational symmetry, but beyond that it's simply fun to play with. Drag around the fuzzy white dot to draw patterns. Hit the "RESET" button in the lower right to clear the screen.
Here's an animation showing a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem by area-preserving shearing. I added an animated gif of it to the Wikipedia page for that theorem, here. (Other contributions I've made to Wikipedia are collected here.)
Javascript math games
I've recently started exploring making math games in javascript, so that they can run directly in any web browser. I've been using the libraries p5.js and p5play.
