Assignment 3 Reflection

 *NEW* Personal reflection on what you learned and take away from Assignment 3 after you present 

I learned the history and wisdom of a traditional game Tangram and we found it fascinating. It's so useful in the mathematical realm and it's quite easy to use in the mathematical classroom. Almost all grades could figure it out. For example the grade 8 's will be learning areas and volumes of different shapes. We could give the tangram shapes to them and let them figure the areas out using their existing knowledge about the areas of certain shapes. The parallelogram example in the video is an example. Also, even for surface areas we could let them use tangram to build things and figure out how many 2-d shapes we have in a 3-d shape. (how we add those areas of the 2-d shapes to get the total surface area of the 3-d shape) In a thinking classroom. the kids could totally get this themselves. 

They could even figure out areas of strange shapes such as trapezoids and many other peculiar shapes once they know the area of each individual piece of tangram. 

It would also be a brain-developing and fun exercise if they try to figure out the  paradoxes presented in the ppt.

I think I learned that such simple games could be highly useful in a math classroom and we should use every tool we have in the world to enhance our teaching practices. We need to be creative and link these simple puzzles to the math concepts. In this way the students would also be more engaged and the classes would be more fun to the students rather than a burden.