Mathematics Genius Hour Blog

Cheat sheets/summary notes are common for university students while they take tests and exams. I found it very helpful to reduce my test anxiety and improve my performance when I was an undergraduate student. In this blog, I will explain why a cheat sheet is helpful. Second, how we can use it in coding and programming?  The literature review showed that about 50% of college students frequently experience psychological conditions known as test anxiety (Kavakci et al., 2014). Anxiety while studying is a major predictor of academic performance (McCraty, 2007) and various studies have demonstrated that it has a negative effect on school performance (Vitarsi, P. 2010). High test anxiety could potentially lower well-being directly via worry about failing tests and examinations, and indirectly through tainting the positive elements of school life (e.g., reduced confidence in one’s ability and positive attitudes towards school) During my practicum and my previous experiences, I met many st...

  Spiral Curriculum In my last block of practicum, my teaching associate was encouraging me to observe several classes besides her class to be familiar with different styles of teaching.   I observed mathematics in grade 9, and I reviewed their Google Classroom.  I had a short conversation with the teacher after class. The organization of contents in the Google Classroom was confusing, so I asked for more clarification. The teacher explained to me that this organization is based on the spiral curriculum. However, I didn't get it completely.  Last week, I reviewed some related articles to understand the concept. In this blog, I would like to share my thoughts/understanding of this method.   Jerome Bruner described firstly this concept in 1960. The spiral curriculum is based on the continuous revising of lessons. Students revisit the lessons on several occasions, each time with an increasing layer of difficulty to previous ones.  The competence of st...

                                                            Coding is a basic literacy in the digital age, and high schoolers must understand the technology around them. one important component of digital literacy is using essential terms properly, including programming and coding. As these terms are overlapping, they are being used interchangeably, which is not always true. In this blog, I would like to explain the main difference between these terms.   Coding is all about writing instructions for a program in an intermediary coding language such as Python or R. In coding we communicate with machines, writing some logical; syntaxes that are understandable for computers. Therefore, when we talk about the job of coding, we mean creating these lines of code. Coding is a smaller part of a programming job.  Programming, on the o...