Math Playground

We talked about Logo programming language and math in the elementary classroom with our guest Colleen King.

• Maria shared her background with Logo and Roamer robots in her kinder class, and her connections with Colleen who runs an after school Math Group and the Math Playground web site
• Colleen described about how programming and programming robots can be used to teach mathematics in a way that is fun and gets to standards
• There was a discussion about Second Life and how promising this could be for math instruction with children.
• Colleen talked about the need for not just interactive but open-ended math games that don't have just one right answer
• We finished with an interesting discussion about manipulatives, and how Colleen and Maria's thinking about online manipulatives had changed over time from negative to positive.