Online Problem Sets

Welcome teachers! If you’re reading this, that means you are a motivated, great teacher, and you probably know something about MathDice already. You can browse through the table of contents or jump directly to a section.

Introduction

This is an experimental section, designed specifically for teachers. We want to share this new feature of our MathDice program with you. We also are asking you to get involved: to evaluate what we’re trying to do, to try these challenge sets with your students, and to write to us with your observations, comments and suggestions. (If you’re interested in developing problem sets that we can post on the site, please get in touch and we will work with you to do this.) We’re in the early stages of building and testing this program now, and we want to incorporate all the good ideas we can find as fast as possible.

We’re starting with the understanding that the basic MathDice game is a great tool to help students improve their number sense skills. The game involves just three numbers, few enough to keep in your head, but when combined with two operations and a choice for where to put the parentheses, it can get plenty tricky. You’ve played so you should know what we mean.

Online MathDice creates the same excitement as the dice rolling game, and adds a number of features as well. In the online game players must deliberately focus on the syntax of their math equations, making sure the order of operations is correct as well as the numbers and operators themselves. Also, it’s easy to switch the numbers, operators and parentheses on the screen, which encourages students to explore and learn what happens when they try different combinations. As time goes on, we’ll keep adding features to make the overall program more robust and more fun.

With our MathDice Teacher’s Resource, we’ve added more features specifically designed to help you as a teacher. Our goal is to create short MathDice Problem Sets that take 10 minutes or so for your students to complete, that you can offer to challenge your students as part of a regular MathDice routine. Each Problem Set will be based on a specific math principle, and we’ll post comments next to it that explains the principle being represented and includes a few teaching dot-points for how to best lead a class discussion.

There are two features we’ve added in particular that are worth calling out. These are

We’ve made it so that the dice can be all sorts of numbers, including fractions and negative numbers. When your kids are ready, you won’t believe how they’ll respond to the roll of fractional dice… or how fast they’ll learn the underlying concepts.
We can now fix any part of the equation to a specific value. This is like putting the challenge into a harness, so that players are required to follow a certain thinking process to get to the correct solution. As you’ll see, the benefit of this is that problem sets can then be designed so that all the challenges express a specific math principle, a principle that is one that you want to teach and reinforce through the exercise. To give you a first glimpse of what this means on a practical level, try solving the following MathDice challenge by filling in where the “2” and the “3” should go in the equation. ( 2, 3 5 Target 4 : 5+( - )= 4 )

We’ve just started to scratch the surface of what can be demonstrated, and what we’re finding is pretty amazing. MathDice Problem Sets can be used at all levels, from basic addition/subtraction to multiplying fractions. Follow on to the next page for a full description of this program, and to view the problem sets we’ve already created.