Professor Richard M. Felder has been involved in teaching engineering for over thirty years, and his column has appeared in the journal, Chemical Engineering, since 1988. Professor Felder retired several years ago, but he has made a point of continuing with his rather timely and useful updates about the world of teaching in the college classroom. Visitors to this site can scan through some of his...

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) continues to build on their already solid online presence with the addition of this lecture by noted mathematician and scholar Professor Ruth Charney. This particular lecture was given at the MAA's Carriage House Conference Center in the fall of 2008 and it deals with how cubes can be used to represent a variety of systems. As Charney notes, "The...

This website from the Children's Discovery Museum (CDM) in San Jose, California, offers a variety of interactive tools and games for children ages 4 to 10 years. The mathematics game featured is a card game called Arithmetic Rummy and requires a printer, while other features are more graphic-oriented. For example, an interactive video takes children through a short journey about energy, while...

The Science and Mathematics Initiative for Learning Enhancement, or SMILE program, is a project of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Center and is funded by a grant from the Lucent Technologies Foundation. The program is "designed to enhance the elementary and high school learning of Science and Mathematics through the use of the phenomenological approach." On this website, the project...

Both math and earth science educators may be interested in Explosion Math, a lesson plan provided by Science Friday's Educator Collaborative (featured in the 10-13-2017 Scout Report). In this standards-aligned lesson, which was written for middle and high school students, learners are challenged "to answer the age-old question of who would win between an Olympic sprinter, tortoise, car, you, and a...

This August 2016 episode of Science Friday features a lively discussion between three educators on a number of questions relating to K-12 mathematics education. What mathematics skills should be taught in K-12 schools? How should these skills be taught? Should all students take the same mathematics courses? And what mathematical skills and concepts do students really need in the so-called "real...

This page from the US Department of Education lays out the case for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education. Readers will likely be interested to learn that some STEM fields are predicted to increase by a third and more this decade. Still, only 16 percent of American high school seniors are proficient in math and interested in STEM careers, and the nation suffers from a paucity...

The Concord Consortium's Seeing Math Telecommunications Project, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education, "develops multimedia case studies and digital tools for elementary and middle school mathematics teacher professional development." The core feature of this project are the Internet-based video case studies, which explore "the way individual teachers meet the challenge of...

As mathematics instructors and students know, lucid visualizations are essential to helping learners understand complex mathematical concepts. Seeing Theory is an online, interactive textbook that utilizes colorful, interactive visualizations and animations to explain concepts like compound probability and Bayesian Inference. This resource was envisioned by Daniel Kunin (currently a master's...

You know you're in for a real treat when a lecture starts off with "I just happen to have with me today this bucket filled with soap solution, water, and some glycerin." That happens to be the opening line from a talk given by Professor Michael Dorff at the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Dorff's talk was quite hands-on and it included a number of skeletal Zometool creations and...