Math Apps for iPad

Math Champ
Price: Free

Looking for a way to help students enjoy maths and improve their results?  Math champ is a challenging and innovative quiz game designed for classrooms that your students will go nuts over.  Any student with a device can compete head to head to become the class Math Champ. The app has hundreds of quiz questions. The only other thing you need to do before play kicks off is to select some game content - select the grade and the difficulty level and Math Champ will do the rest. The use of game rewards, along with in-game notifications and colorful characters means that even your least interested math students will get a kick out of competing in Math Champ. 

Download the app here: Math Champ

Calculus Pro
Price: $0.99

Calculus has been known to bring students to tears. Now you have an expert in your corner.

This application contains a rich collection of examples, tutorials, and solvers.  It has tutorials and examples over many different topics in calculus such as: limits, continuity, differentiability  partial derivatives, chain rule, product rule, taylor series, theorems, and much more.

Download the app here: Calculus Pro

Superimpose
Price: $0.99

Just with a few taps, create professional grade superimposed or juxtaposed photos on your iPhone! You don't need a computers and expensive software to superimpose or cut/copy/paste one photo on top of another any more.

You can also use this tool to do serious photo editing tasks like blending textures or overlaying borders or to do double exposure with adjustable transparency and 18 blending modes.

Masking in the app is the most powerful one available on the app store, just tap on an area of the photo, and the app will mask out all the connected area with similar colors. Or you can use brush, lasso, global color similarity, rectangle, ellipse, linear, bi-linear or radial gradient masking tools. Mask a portion with this tool and that portion of the foreground image will become transparent and reveal the background.

Download the app here: Superimpose

Embed QR Codes in Pictures

With Visualead you can create your QR codes over the top of photo of your choice.  They look way better than a traditional QR code and you can easily make a black and white one for your classroom.  No more boring QR codes, with images they are the best way to incorporate QR codes into any classroom.

1. You will have to sign-up for an account, if you sign up for the free account it looks almost similar to the other QR codes for silver or gold memberships.  
2. Once you have signed in, click on Create More.
3. You come to a screen where you can enter a website URL, vCard, YouTube Video, Facebook, Twitter, Application URL, Email Address, or Google Maps, as well as Text.  
4. Once you have entered your URL, click next.
5. This screen allows you to incorporate a photo.  
6. You can browse files and folders from your library or you can use one in the gallery.  
7. Once you have selected a image, click next.
8. Now you have a QR code over your image, you can resize your QR and image to be placed. 
9. When done click on Generate Silver. (Even if you don't.) 
10. Then on the next screen you can click on the free and download the image to your desktop and use it however you want.

Try it here: Visualead

The one I created is one the right.

Free Calculus Books

From Slashdot there are 5 free Calculus Textbooks:

First-Year Calculus Notes
The author provides this book in PDF format. As far as I can tell from the somewhat ambiguous notice on his web page, the book is intended to be licensed under the GPL copyleft license. That warms my heart as an open-source enthusiast, but it's slightly strange, for a couple of reasons. First, the GPL is a software license, and is less suitable as a copyleft license for books than the GFDL or a CC license. Also, the source code of the book isn't available (it appears to have been done in LaTeX), which I think makes it legally impossible under the GPL to redistribute the book, whereas the author's intent in GPL-ing it was presumably to make it freely distributable. Just as I was in the process of submitting this review to Slashdot, the author replied to an email I'd sent him about this, and it sounds like he's interested in clearing up this issue, and really does want his book to be free as in speech.


Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus
The book is well written, and seems to have been well designed for practical classroom use. The approach is visual and intuitive, and there are lots and lots of graphs and numerical calculations. I felt, however, that it took a long time to get going, and the idiosyncratic selection of topics might make it difficult to use at many schools. Although the very first page gives a nice clear explanation of what calculus is about, we then have to wait until about page 136 to learn any calculus. I say "about" because of the inconvenient way in which the book is split up into 54 separate PDF files, each of which has page numbers starting from 1. I had to estimate page number 136 by weighing part of the book on a postal scale. Related to this problem is the fact that the book has no index or table of contents.


Lectures on Calculus
This book is from a set of lectures on calculus given by visiting professor Evgeny Shchepin at Uppsala University in 2001. The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded. This makes it virtually impossible to view the book on a monitor in any legible representation, although it looks fine when you print it out. The typical Windows or MacOS user will give up long before that point. This is a shame, because it's not at all difficult these days to get LaTeX to output Adobe Acrobat files that are viewable on virtually any computer, and are legible on the screen. There is no index, and virtually no graphs or other figures.

Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals
Textbooks are usually unoriginal, because most teachers are conservative in their choices. They get used to teaching a subject a certain way, and don't want to change. This is a calculus textbook with a very unusual approach. It was published in 1976, and evidently was successful enough, despite its idiosyncrasy  to justify a second edition a decade later. Its publisher, however, eventually allowed it to go out of print. The copyright has reverted to the author, and he has made it available in digital form on his web site. The digital book consists of pages scanned in from a printed copy and assembled into an Acrobat file, so it's a big download, and you can't do some things with it, such as searching the text for a particular word.


The Calculus Bible
I'm reviewing this book in February of 2004. It's clearly not a finished product, and I'm not sure whether or not the author is still actively working on it. The book is available from the Brigham Young University math department's server, but the author isn't on the department's list of faculty, which makes me think he may have moved on to another job and abandoned the book. It's provided as a PDF file. There is no copyright page and no licensing agreement, so it's hard to know the book's real legal status.

Check out more of the reviews here: Five Free Calculus Textbooks

Math Videos

Learni.st provides great ways of keeping all of your videos in one place and make a great place to show student videos.  At learni.st you get to put all your favorite YouTube videos on a educational video player.  Students can watch a particular playlist and it is a great way to flip your classroom with great and useful videos.

Check out this playlist: Center of Math

These are fun little videos that you can include in your classroom, these 3-5 minute videos are great little explanations of mathematics in a short time period.  Students could talk about the video or write a response to the video in their math journal.

Check out Learni.st here: http://learni.st/

Zombies and Math (AAH!!)

Zombies and mathematics looks like it would be two things that didn't quite go together.  Andrew Miller had a project-based learning project about Zombie-based Learning.

With math and zombies most of the material has to do with diseases that increase at an exponential rate.  Students could analyze different population centers and predict its spread using exponential functions.  They could determine when everyone is infected and map the spread using the math data they calculate, or even explore the rate of decay.  Students could also investigate what happens when a certain number of people are vaccinated to help prevent the spread.

These are some ideas that have been implemented as part of a PBL project or would be a good entry point for zombie-based learning across the curriculum.

Zombie-based Learning

English to Spanish Math Glossary

Featured in today's post is an elementary school level mathematics glossary for English to Spanish glossary.  This works great for many teachers who teach in a ELL math classroom or in a high population of Hispanic students.  Some of these glossary terms work great in middle and high school math classrooms.

algebraic expression       expresión algebraica
algebraic patterns           patrones algebraicos
algebraic relationship      relación algebraica
algebraic relationships    relaciones algebraicas
algebraically                  algebraicamente

algorithm                       algoritmo
distributive property      propiedad distributiva
divide                           dividir
dividend                       dividendo
divisibility test               prueba de divisibilidad

geometric fact              hecho geométrico
geometric figure           figura geométrica
geometric pattern         patrón geométrico
geometric solid            sólido geométrico
geometry                     geometría

line                              línea
line graph                    gráfico lineal
line of symmetry          línea de simetría
line plot                      diagrama lineal
line segment                segmento lineal

See more glossary terms in spanish here: Glossary

Ada Lovelace Paper Doll

Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King nee Byron, as in daughter of Lord Byron) was a writer that assisted Charles Babbage with his analytical engine.  And while she's commonly referred to as simply a "writer."  She is deserved to rightly be described as a mathematician and quite possibly the world's first computer programmer.  But no matter what you call here, she was an amazing individual and her contributions to math and computing are very real and tangible.


So featured below is one mathematician paper doll.




Check out the site here for more: Ada Lovelace