School: The Lincoln School
Teachers: Connie Bryan
Audience: Third graders
Project: Understanding Multiplication Concepts.
Ms. Bryan, with whom we worked successfully last year on "Bridges",
thinks that a program illustrating the concept of multiplication (adding
things in groups) would be very helpful to her students. In class, she
has limited time to build arrays, usually using tiles, that represent
the rows and columns that make the area of the product. A program that
allowed students to build and manipulate arrays would be helpful.
Extending this concept,
students could also write their own multiplication problems and illustrate
them using arrays or some other sort of symbol(s). The concept of
rectangle arrays could be used to then illustrate prime numbers (which of
course cannot be made into rectangles). Another logical extension might be
permutations illustrating practical uses of multiplication in solving such
problems as "How many outfits can I make if I have four shirts and three
skirts". Active participation in the creation of mathematical problems and
solutions seems to be effective for girls.
Possible tools include Director, Authorware, and Java/HTML.