This article presents some paper-folding activities for students to explore a different way to prove some of the angle properties in a circle.

The Price is Right Bidder's Row and games provide many opportunities for mathematical connections. The Price is Right website has videos or pictures for students to see how each game is played (http://www.priceisright.com/games/). This article will describe the mathematics of probability and statistics that is integrated in the famous television…

As outlined in the paper "The 20 Matchstick Triangle Challenge: An Activity to Foster Reasoning and Problem Solving" by Pat Graham and Helen Chick [EJ1093090], an incredibly useful set of information about the mathematical ability of your students will be revealed. You can look at the way your students try to solve the 20 matchsticks…

This article describes the implementation of a collaborative--competative pedagogy in a Year 10 class and the productive motivational outcomes that followed.

Progressing from additive to multiplicative thinking is critical for the development of middle school students' proportional reasoning abilities. Yet, many middle school mathematics teachers lack a thorough understanding of additive versus multiplicative situations. This article describes a sequence of instructional activities used to develop the…

The plane problem is a real-world problem, presented without any suggestion as to how it might be solved. It arose unexpectedly as the author was messing around on the internet, not thinking about maths at all. She did not encounter the problem in a maths lesson, nor as homework in the middle of a unit on a particular topic, and so she had no…

In this article, the authors present a writing activity that allowed pre-service teachers to be creative in the mathematics classroom. Inspired by "The Important Book" by Margaret Wise Brown, students explored secondary-level mathematics concepts, discussing various attributes/characteristics of each concept through their written…

When considering the use of games for teaching mathematics, educators should distinguish between an "activity" and a "game". Gough (1999) states that "A 'game' needs to have two or more players, who take turns, each competing to achieve a 'winning' situation of some kind, each able to exercise some choice about how to move…

Mathematical models are conceptual processes that use mathematics to describe, explain, and/or predict the behaviour of complex systems. This article is written for teachers of mathematics in the junior secondary years (including out-of-field teachers of mathematics) who may be unfamiliar with mathematical modelling, to explain the steps involved…

Most readers would be familiar with the standard domino set which is played with rectangular domino tiles. The domino set, sometimes called a deck or pack, consists of 28 dominoes, colloquially nicknamed bones, cards, tiles, stones, or spinners. A domino set is a generic gaming device, similar to playing cards or dice, in that a variety of games…

This article looks at a simple geometry problem that also involves some reasoning about number combinations, and show how it was used in a Year 7 classroom. The problem is accessible to students with a wide range of abilities, and provides scope for stimulating extensive discussion and reasoning in the classroom, as well as an opportunity for…

This discussion-based lesson is designed to support Year 6 students in their initial understanding of using letters to represent numbers, expressions, and equations in algebra. The three level framework is designed for: (1) making thinking explicit, (2) exploring each other's solutions, and (3) developing new mathematical insights. In each level…

Many fraction activities rely on the use of area models for developing partitioning skills. These models, however, are limited in their ability to assist students to visualise a fraction of an object when the whole changes. This article describes a fraction modelling activity that requires the transfer of water from one container to another. The…

Almost 20 years ago, Cuoco, Goldenberg, and Mark wrote a seminal paper for the "Journal of Mathematical Behavior" entitled "Habits of Mind: An Organizing Principle for Mathematics Curricula" (Cuoco et al., 1996). The article remains as relevant today as when it was originally published. The premise of their paper is that…

Within the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics" the Understanding proficiency strand states, "Students build understanding when they connect related ideas, when they represent concepts in different ways, when they identify commonalities and differences between aspects of content, when they describe their thinking mathematically and…