Author: Mark

Posted on

Tommyball Princess

I really enjoy the Unmade Podcast with Brady Haran and Tim Hein. They generate some wonderful ideas, and the fact that it’s two old friends hanging out reminds me of the conversations (and podcasts) I have with my own friends.

One particular bit that has been ongoing in special episodes is Tommyball. It’s a fictional sport with no clear rules (it’s essentially Calvinball), and in these special episodes it’s Brady interviewing Tim, who plays the role of a conceited former player, and current commentator, of Tommyball. The most recent episode has Tim reading the audiobook of his recently released autobiography.

Tickled by this general idea, I decided I would write my own few chapters of a biography for Tim. It was a fun evening making it, and I figured it would be good to post here. You can download the PDF below.

TommyballPrincessDownload
Posted on

A Shift in Focus

I’ve moved to a new position at work recently, going from a Curriculum Developer to a Curriculum Project Manager. My main role is no longer creating products that will directly go off to students (although I’ll still be doing a bit of that). Instead, my job is to create the processes and structures for my fellow curriculum developers to make sure they have clear goals in a project, and a set of tasks that allows them to effectively get their work done. The entire goal is to remove the planning and scheduling cruft that our team was doing (poorly) on our own, since we could each only give a little bit of time to thinking about it.

It’s an interesting change in personal focus. I still love creating things directly for students, and I love sharing my passion for math. That will never change, and I’ll still pull to do that a bit at work, as well as on my own. Yet it’s exciting to get this adjustment to my perspective. It provides me with a chance to handle larger responsibility, and lets me build whatever I would like as a curriculum developer to help make projects run more smoothly. I’m still finding my bearings and determining the boundaries of this position, but it’s an exciting time. I hope it gives me more bandwidth to do some of the more creative work in my free time as well.

Posted on

Personal Organization Sucks

Work has been getting crazier in the past week or two. We are now planning on being online for a while, and the curriculum work that has resulted is growing rapidly. There are many courses to rewrite as we experiment, on the fly, to figure out what tools we want to use (or avoid). I’ve been put in charge of these experiments, and it’s a much larger logistical task than I’ve ever had to deal with. It pales in comparison to what others have done, but it’s quite a doozy on my end.

Continue reading “Personal Organization Sucks”
Posted on

A Short Tribute to John Conway

John Conway passed away a few days ago. He was a favorite among mathematical educators and communicators. He was involved in a large array of interesting projects and results during his career, many that can easily fascinate even the most disinterested people when it comes to mathematics.

Here are a few things he worked on, listed roughly in the order in which I came across them in my mathematical life.

  1. Look-and-Say Sequence
  2. Game of Life
  3. Doomsday Algorithm
  4. Sporadic Groups (and far more generally, the classification of the finite simple groups)
  5. Surreal Numbers

Any of these are a treat to look into. Conway was a powerhouse of interesting and engaging ideas. Take a look at the Numberphile videos involving him for a slice of the world from his perspective.

Posted on

Creative Quarantine

Maybe artists and writers of centuries past had it right, that isolation and odd situations gives a creative surge. Being cooped up at home more than usual has led me to seek out more novelty, and with that has come a desire to create that novelty myself. Over the past weekend I messed around more with Garageband on my iPad, and wrote a small RPG (which I’ll post about once I play it this weekend.)

Having a hectic schedule due to work has also caused things to move around in my head. I’ve lost my routine for a while, and though I’m eager to reestablish it this upcoming week, having things shaken up has given me a lot to think about. Of course, implicit in all this is that I’m in a privileged position that allows me to take advantage of the current situation, and other people are not so lucky. But I am still happy to count the creative outcomes of this situation among my blessings.

Posted on

PDF Tools for Teaching

As we’ve been transitioning our in-person learning centers to be fully online, the question has come up about how to use slides and work with students. While Zoom offers screen-sharing and annotation, the annotation on an actual slide persists on the screen: if you scroll to a new slide, the annotation remains. There’s no way to annotate a document using Zoom. Even worse, the “whiteboard” feature in Zoom, though cool in many ways, really loses out by having no way to paste formatted text, or even images, onto it. That takes away significant functionality.

At our learning centers, we use a Windows-only piece of software called Drawboard. It’s a pretty nice piece of software with nice annotation tools. It could be a bit more fully-featured (making straight lines or shapes is rather difficult/impossible), but our teachers are used to it. However, it’s $12 and we can’t expect teachers to buy it. Furthermore, all of our teachers are working from home, and many will be using Mac (or even Linux, believe it or not!) So, this isn’t an option. Luckily during my time training, I got some recommendations from a few resourceful teachers.

First is Xodo. It’s a browser-based app where you can import and mark up PDF documents. That’s really all there is to say. It has the same features our instructors are familiar with, and works pretty fine. I actually had some trouble getting it to be as responsive, but I haven’t heard that complaint from others, so it might be specific to me.

Another is bitpaper. This one I really like. It has collaboration features (although teachers likely wouldn’t use them), but it’s much sleeker than Xodo in my opinion. It has a more “iPad” feel to it, with the tools in the bottom very similar to those in the Apple Notes app. It has basic straight-line drawing and keyboard shortcuts.

I’m still working on properly vetting these before we can officially recommend as a company, but they all pass the smell test for me. Even if you aren’t a teacher and just want simple PDF tools, I think Xodo is a good place to start for a lot of mark-up, and bitpaper is excellent for easy collaboration.

Posted on

Zoom

My company is using Zoom, as are many universities and public school systems, to teach online. I’m hoping at some point, when the fires are put out, I can provide some of my own suggestions for using Zoom that have come up during my time dealing with the transition. For now, another short post.

The biggest thing for us is being able to still run interesting activities that are engaging. Just because this new medium assumes lecture-style classes on the surface, there’s a lot that can still be done with a bit of creativity.

Posted on

On Fire

I lost track of getting a blog post written, but it has been a hectic week. This is my first true things are on fire situation at work with the Coronavirus. Since I work in education, and we have in-person academies where students take classes, it has been a massive effort by a lot of people to figure out what to do. We are switching to online classes through Zoom, and I have been declared the resident Zoom trainer and expert. I enjoy learning new technology, but doing so this quickly under this pressure has been quite a lot. It’s still not all over, but I figured I would write a post before the week was officially over to at least stay within my “updates weekly” tagline.