Hello world!

Welcome to Math Accent! I am Maria Droujkova, here to talk about Natural Math community projects, the Math 2.0 Interest Group, Math Clubs, math publishing, math games, and family math events.

I plan to speak and to write a bit every day. Let’s see what happens!

Math Playground, Colleen King’s site where we are moving math game discussions of our communities

Tagxedo is my neat toy of the day – thank you Ryan Goble of MindBlue for sending me his NY Times blog post “Tech Tips for Teachers” where I saw the review.

“Family Educator Commons” essay with Carol Cross was a meaningful task. We need to put it somewhere more visible and create discussions about it. A friend, for example, told me this sort of education is only possible for people dedicating all their waking hours to kids. I went and counted the hours in the described “one day in the life of a homeschooler” and it turned out the mother was spending 3.5 hours and the father 1.5 – quite doable, if more than the American average.  I want more of those conversations, though.

For a few years, I wanted nothing to do with dead tree books, because it looked like they may go away completely. By now it’s clear what roles paper books, or electronic books designed after them, can reasonably play in the next ten years or so. We are busy making some paper books about Natural Math. The artwork with Natural Math characters Victoria drew over the last five years really helps.

I need to find, and put up, files with character descriptions. I remember that Jenny likes to write and Luis is a rebel. Here are these kids’ hypothetical choices about times tables, which I used to illustrate the study we are now doing:

Sonya is being an artist. The stories parents submitted so far show a greater variety.