This work is a segment of an ongoing doctoral research in Brazil. The Leonardo numbers and the Leonardo sequence have gained attention from mathematicians and the academic community. Despite being a relatively new sequence within mathematical literature, its discussion has intensified over the past five years, giving rise to other branches, with…

This paper walks the reader through a simple mathematical characterization of the popular children's game, "Chutes and Ladders," focusing primarily on Monte Carlo simulation. The focus is then shifted to the board game "No Te Enojes" in order to analyze the implications of the introduction of strategy. The presence of strategy…

Probabilistic machine learning increasingly informs critical decisions in medicine, economics, politics, and beyond. To aid the development of trust in these decisions, we develop a taxonomy delineating where trust in an analysis can break down: (1) in the translation of real-world goals to goals on a particular set of training data, (2) in the…

This is an article about abstraction, generalization, and the beauty of mathematics. We claim that abstraction and generalization in of itself may very well be a beauty of the human mind. The fact that we humans continue to explore and expand mathematics is truly beautiful and remarkable. Many years ago, our ancestors understood that seven stones,…

Kelley's Discrimination Index (DI) is a simple and robust, classical non-parametric short-cut to estimate the item discrimination power (IDP) in the practical educational settings. Unlike item-total correlation, DI can reach the ultimate values of +1 and -1, and it is stable against the outliers. Because of the computational easiness, DI is…

The purpose of these notes is to generalize and extend a challenging geometry problem from a mathematics competition. The notes also contain solution sketches pertaining to the problems discussed.

Traditional school laboratory exercises on a system of moving objects connected by strings involve deriving expressions for the system acceleration, a = (?F)/m, and sketching a graph of acceleration vs. force. While being in the form of rational functions, these expressions present great opportunities for broadening the scope of the analysis by…

As a programmer when solving a problem, a number of conscious and unconscious cognitive operations are being performed. Problem-solving is a gradual and cyclic activity; as the mind is adjusting the problem to its schemas formed by its previous experiences, the programmer gets closer and closer to understanding and defining the problem. The…

Pasifika cultures have a rich background of mathematics including a strong emphasis on patterns used within craft design (Finau & Stillman, 1995). However, there have been limited studies which have investigated the use of contextual Pasifika patterns in mathematics classrooms. The aim of this study was to explore how contextual Pasifika…

This paper focuses on pattern generalisation as a way to introduce young students to early algebra. We build on research on patterning activities that feature, in their work with algebraic thinking, both looking for sameness recursively in a pattern (especially figural patterns, but also numerical ones) and conjecturing about function-based…

Patterns and generalization are one of the most fundamental aspects of mathematics, which makes recent decades, mathematical tasks which include patterns, whether they are numerical or graphical, are mostly used, for example researching generalization. The aim of this paper is to investigate how a special kind of task concerning well-known…

Generalization is a critical aspect of doing mathematics, with policy makers recommending that it be a central component of mathematics instruction at all levels. This recommendation poses serious challenges, however, given researchers consistently identifying students' difficulties in creating and expressing normative mathematical…

There is a renewed debate about whether educated adults solve simple addition problems (e.g., 2 + 3) by direct fact retrieval or by fast, automatic counting-based procedures. Recent research testing adults' simple addition and multiplication showed that a 150-ms preview of the operator (+ or ×) facilitated addition, but not multiplication,…

The present study explores reasoning and argumentation in Greek mathematics and physics texts in specific topics related to the notion of periodicity. In our study, argumentation is taken as the sequence of the modes of reasoning (MsoR) that an author develops in a text when organizing and presenting new knowledge. Inductive content analysis was…

A cognitive schema is a mechanism which allows an individual to organize her/his experiences in such a way that a new similar experience can easily be recognised and dealt with successfully. Well-structured schemas provide for the knowledge base for subsequent mathematical activities. A new experience can be assimilated into a previously existing…