Pattern-ing paper

[Maria Droujkova]

Hello,

As promised, here is the patterning paper I briefly flashed at Wednesday's meeting. The two main ideas:

- The very fact that a pattern has to be regular and predictable is a concept kids need to construct for themselves. It's by no means automatic or obvious, and it should not be assumed by teachers. Yet most pattern activities I've seen in papers start at already-regular, already-predictable patterns - hence kids struggle, since they aren't there conceptually, yet. So, I invite kids to make growth patterns - and most make unpredictable sequences at first!!! Then I ask them to make predictable ones, then compare and contrast the two kinds (predictable or not). It makes a huge difference.

- The transition from making one step predictable to making Nth element in the pattern predictable is hard (all researchers I've read say that). The usual solution is attenuating the examples - making them simpler. However, what I found much more effective is the opposite - amplifying kids' power to match the complexity of examples they attempt to tackle. Computer tools are good at it, but also certain questions and visual approaches.

Here is a very raw and hairy draft of a paper, with many pictures from my and other people's experiments. Let me know if parts of it make sense.

https://docs.google.com/View?id=ddjkthrd_343fjsfd7dv

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.