Nate's Class

Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoxcjq-8xIDTYp3uz647V5A Numberphile is a really wonderful YouTube Channel featuring interviews with math professors talking about interesting mathematical ideas. There are many videos here, and it can be difficult to sort through which ones might be relevant or interesting to you and your students, so give it some time. UPDATE: I really enjoyed this video about Annoying Problems. A couple of the problems were problems that I have already used in class (the bat and the baseball, the lily pads on a pond). I also thought that the traffic and car accidents problem in the video would be really interesting to present to students because it is so open for discussion. UPDATE: Recently, I really enjoyed the video called A Problem With Rectangles. What I love about the video is the talk about problem solving strategies, and how different strategies are all used for solving one problem. Basically, the problem is about filling up a square with rectangles. How many rectangles in a certain proportion can be used to fill up a square? If I show this video to my students, I will pause it near the end and ask them if they can find a way to fill up a square with 7 rectangles. UPDATE: In planning a unit on exponents, I came across the video about Googol and Googolplex. This video has some really interesting comparisons for the scale of a googol and googolplex, including the fact that the number of grains of sand that would be needed to fill the entire universe is less than a googol! These ideas provide some great connections to science and offer explanation of why exponents are useful and at the same time how powerful they are for representing really large numbers.