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...

  In this blog, I will write my thoughts on how learning a programming language, such as R can prepare high school students for their professional goals in the data science field .  Data Science of fers one of the most promising long-term and  rapidly growing career fields  of the last decade. within the data science field, we learn to mine, analyze, and transform data to predict a business’s future. we use data to derive and extract meaningful insights which are becoming valuable for a variety of fields from finance to healthcare to academic research.      There   is a growing need for up-and-coming generations of students to learn how to effectively transform raw data into knowledge. As students learn biology, chemistry, and physics, I think high school students should start to build a strong foundation in data science early in their educational training to support progressive proficiency in data science later. Data analytic skills are an essent...

New changes in Curriculum grade-9  My project is about coding for the data management course, which is being offered in grade 12.    The coding component reminds me of what we discussed about the  de-streaming of mathematics. In this blog, I would focus on the de-steaming of mathematics in grade 9. Since September 2021, the Ontario school boards started to de-streaming mathematics grade 9.                                    What does it really mean? De-streaming means that students will no longer be separated into Academic and Applied Streams. A de-streamed mathematics class will prepare students for university, college, apprenticeship, and workplace pathways. Ontario is the only province in the country that separates students into academic and non-academic streams as early as Grade 9. Finding r...

Why R language, In this blog, I will explain why I will be choosing the R language for the data management course, 1. R is an open-source programming language, students can install and use it without any difficulty. R-studio also provides an interactive interface for students to practice coding. 3. “R is the most popular language in the world of Data Science. It is heavily used in analyzing data that is both structured and unstructured. This has made R, the standard language for performing statistical operations. R allows various features that set it apart from other Data Science languages.” 4. Mathematics of data management is a course that is based on data visualization, descriptive analysis, data analysis, and probability. This programming language provides effective tools, functions, and packages to be employed for any type of computational and data analysis. 5. R comprises libraries like ggplot2, plotly that offer aesthetic graphical plots to its users. R is most widely recogniz...

I believe learning coding skills are essential for high school students. In this post, I would like to demonstrate some reasons, why students, must be familiar with programming and coding before going to school. 1. The tech industry continues to grow exponentially every year. Students need to learn digital skills to work. 2. Coding skills provide great opportunities to create content, for instance, instead of only using games as consumers, they learn how they can create them. 2. Students can develop their creativity through coding skills. Coding is based on the input-output process. Students learn to find logical processes to convert an input to the desired output. Within this rational process, they can develop their analytical thinking. 3. One thing that I teach my student would be taking risks, making mistakes, and learning from failures. I think the coding environment provides a safe place for students to take risks and fail, which is one effective way of learning. Through th...