I-MATH

Getting Started

You may recall the four important concepts of I-MATH, Imagination, Investigation, Interaction, and Illumination. I can assume that you already have a good imagination, and are looking for ways to increase your creativity and to learn new methods of teaching, learning and communicating because you are reading these web pages! We will come back to this topic soon. Because of the importance of these words, they will be part of the header of each page. Please feel free to skip over them whenever you like.

Imagination: thinking outside the box, thinking creatively, dreaming up new projects and new methods of teaching, learning, and communicating)

Investigation: hands-on exploration of mathematics - what can you discover? where do your discoveries lead? what connections are there?

Interaction: collaboration with colleagues and with students - communicating, questioning, listening, gaining knowledge and new ideas

Illumination: discovering principles, connections and applications across the curriculum and in "real life", communicating what you have learned.

The four keywords in I-MATH, Investigation, Imagination, Interaction and Illumination are intertwined. One does not come before or after the other. But, practically speaking, we must do one thing and then another. So there may be some repetition, and we may need to "jump around" a bit in these web pages. Fortunately, linking makes these "jumps" easy. So please accept this as part of I-MATH.

Investigation, and hands-on exploration of mathematics is very important part of learning mathematics. If you are a teacher, and your students do not have the Geometer's Sketchpad software, you can still do investigations using compass and straightedge. Not only is it important that they have hands-on experiences, but that they also discuss their findings with other students. For thie reason, I suggest that students work in small groups on these projects.