[VBbuilders] Andrius asks for comments on My Math Story

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Hi Franz and all,

Some of us interested in video bridges might also have ideas for the 
Digital Media and Learning competition for digital innovations for 
teaching math and science.  http://dmlcompetition.net  They have 
extended the deadline for new proposals to February 15, 2010.

I'm requesting comments for my proposal My Math Story.  I will ask for 
50,000 USD for me and 75,000 USD for a global team which I'll organize 
at Minciu Sodas.

You can simply reply to this letter with a thought or two and I can post 
your comment myself.  Or you can register at  
http://dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=679 

Thank you for your solidarity! and your ideas!  and please let me know 
who else might be interested in my proposal!

Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt, ms at ms.lt

--------------------------------------

My Math Story
$125,000
Andrius Kulikauskas, Ph.D.

We collect mathematical quantities (amounts and units) and classic math 
problems (and the deep ideas they illustrate). We thereby foster 
mathematical intuition that arises from working with real life problems 
as opposed to contrived ones. We link up to help real activists around 
the world.

Mathematics is traditionally taught through repetition of contrived 
problems which lack any meaningful context and thus destroy mathematical 
intuition. Instead, we create formats to encourage the collection of 
real life applications. We collect many ourselves, starting with 
quantities that arise in the real world (including news stories, 
almanacs, technical specifications) and organize them by amount 
(increasing) and unit (such as meters, seconds, dollars, grams, liters, 
bits, decibels, watts, meters per second, etc.) We create navigation 
tools so students can grasp orders of magnitude using their own favorite 
examples. We also collect illustrative problems, for example: suppose a 
meal at your cafeteria costs X=$9, and at the restaurant it costs 
one-third more, but you have a coupon for "one-third off" at the 
restaurant, where is it cheaper? (At the restaurant it will be $12 minus 
one-third which is $8, which shows that the meaning of "one-third" 
changes, and so this classic problem illustrates the deep idea that 
algebra is thinking step-by-step.) We show that several dozen thoughtful 
problems can teach all of algebra. We create interfaces for students to 
generate variants of such problems and post along with comments. We link 
the problems to Wolfram Alpha, and also to real life stories of 
"witnesses" from news, educational, activist and social networking 
sites. We especially encourage real life connections with 
witnesses-activists from the developing world, including hundreds that 
we organize to help us collect real math applications and to staff a 
chat room for interactive learning. Our content will be Public Domain. 
We create formats so this activity can be done at wikis (including 
Wikipedia), YouTube, Flickr, and shared via RSS. We help a variety of 
websites host specialized collections and aggregate feeds so that our 
formats take root across the web.