Friday, July 5, 2013

Richard Wilders Reviews Math Made Visual

Math Made VisualRichard Wilders reviews Math Made Visual: Creating Images for Understanding Mathematics by Claudi Alsina and Roger B. Nelson as part of MAA Reviews.

"This wonderful book is a fitting edition to the Classroom Resource series. Indeed any teacher of mathematics at the high school level or above should have a copy. Let me take that a bit further: anyone with an interest in mathematics should have a copy! While I ended up reading it pretty much straight through, this is a wonderful reference book which can be consulted whenever one is stuck for a way to make a concept come to life or for an activity to get students involved in mathematics.

The first two-thirds of the text consists of a wonderful set of examples of how visualization can aid understanding and inspire exploration. Each section ends with a set of challenges for the reader. These problems would make wonderful projects for pre-service high school teachers — many of them can be implemented in Geometer’s Sketchpad. The final section of the book consists of hints for solving these challenges. Sandwiched between these two sections is a short section providing suggestions as to how these ideas can be used on a classroom. While technology would certainly help, many of the hints involve simple paper folding and cutting. Geometer's Sketchpad would certainly suffice to create most all of the 2-dimensional figures."

Read the full review here.
Purchase the book today at the MAA eBooks Store.

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