January/February 2006
IN THIS ISSUE
In March 2001, the last time this journal focused on informal mathematics education, ASTC was about to publish Mathematics in Science Centers, the report of a National Science Foundation–funded survey of six institutions. That report closed by recommending that ASTC undertake a capacity-building initiative aimed at enabling more museums to offer mathematics exhibits and programming. Five years later, we marked the conclusion of our three–year participation in another NSF-funded project, Building Math Momentum in Science Centers (MMSC), led this time by the education research and development organization TERC. In this issue, we discuss some of the outcomes of MMSC (see pages 4–9) and also look beyond it to assess other challenges and rewards of the field’s commitment to hands–on math.
CONTENTS
• Beautiful and Useful: Emphasizing Mathematics in Science Centers, by Melvin D. George
• Gearing Up for Math: Professional Development Builds Capacity, by Deanna Beane
• Finding the Math: A Math Momentum Sampler, by Carolyn Sutterfield and MMSC Teams
• Meet Math: A Tool for Cooperation Between Palestine and Israel, by Peter Hillman
• Handling Calculus: Graphing Motion to a Understand Math, by Ricardo Nemirovsky
• Let’s Replace Math Phobia with Math Appreciation, by Jaine Kopp
• Baskets and Pineapples: Indigenous Math Discovery in Brazil, by Maurice Bazin
• When to Make Math Explicit: Letting the Visitors Decide, by Suzanne Perin
• Joining the Cyberchase: A Cross-Platform Math Opportunity, by Carolyn Sutterfield, Shawntel Landavazo, and Keith Ostfeld
• Tips from the Math Forum, by Gene Klotz
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