cmpalgorithms project

Goals

The main goal of this project is to compare algorithms, to reflect about pros and cons of one algorithm respect to another one.

Although teachers implement very rich tasks in classroom and they have very talented students, in some point students or teachers (or both) need to focus on the procedures (standard or not) to calculate and solve certain things. Certainly, there are more than one way to do things. Perhaps, this project could serve us, as teachers, to reflect which method teach and, more important, why. If this method is what we have always teached, then we will continue doing that. If not, we will have reasons to change.

In other words, the project focus on "how" (not in "when" or "why") paraphrasing Matt Larson in "Balancing the Equation". If you search resources about the other questions, two examples are Which One Doesn't Belong ("why") and Dan Meyer's 3-acts operas ("when").

Origins

The origins of this project came from this entry:

• In my class we corrected some exercises in classroom. The exercises are about solving first grade equations with denominators. The denominators in the equation were 3, 10 and 7 and so one student solving method was first calculate a common multiple of 3, 10 and 7 (210) and then multiply the equation by 210.
• Another student made a mistake and asked me if we could do with 21.
• We try and see that really we could apply this procedure with any number. And we reflect of cons and pros of that.

This made me feel that frequently we, math teachers, explain standard procedures to solve something but surely it could be done in some different way. And I started the project.

Contributing

It's really easy:

• Create a video comparing two or more algorithms. Remember that we focus in Secondary Level and in Mathematics
• Tag it with #cmpalgorithms

That's all. No central server. No moderation.

I strongly recommend you to use any Peertube instances to host videos as a descentralized alternative to Youtube. And of course, with a free license like Creative Commons to allow other freely use your video.

Let me know and I add it in the following list:

• Xavier Bordoy

About me

My name is Xavier Bordoy. I'm a Secondary Mathematics teacher from Spain. Nowadays, I teach in adults school. Sometimes, I post on mastodon.