Virtual Nerd Blog

UA to teach high school level math in the fall

by Josh Salcman on May 4, 2010

Yikes.

The University of Arizona will teach high school level math starting in the next school year, because a third of its freshmen aren’t ready for college level math, officials said.

Read the whole article here: UA to teach high school level math in the fall.

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Puzzle Answer: Chopped Square

Puzzles

For our Chopped Square puzzle, we attempted to find the side length of a square that was chopped up into 6 congruent rectangles. Given a perimeter of 112 units for each of the six rectangles, what’s the length of each side of the square? Algebra steps in to help us out here. Let’s first gather [...]

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Puzzle: Chopped Square

Puzzles

For today’s puzzle, we’ll have a nice blend of geometry and algebra, the visual and the abstract. Geometry is easily applicable to the real world, whether you’re playing billiards or building a skyscraper. And it’s often the case that a bit of proficiency in algebra is required to solve a geometry problem. Hence, algebra also affects [...]

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Beyond the cookie cutter

General Interest

I recently saw Dan Meyer’s outstanding TED talk and felt compelled to reach out to him for his thoughts about Virtual Nerd. He’s right about textbooks often doing a disservice to students when they teach with algorithms and not through discovery. I myself learned to love math by working on contest problems, which pushed me [...]

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Check out this excellent collection of videos about math and science being put to use

General Interest

Convoluted context alert! I found out about this site thanks to a comment posted by someone named Harley on this article about Virtual Nerd, which appeared on the website physorg.com. Harley had this to say: Excellent site – really like the “drill-down” to handle questions within a question, while not losing the “thread” of the overall [...]

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