Punya Mishra's Web

Gaurav Bhatnagar is one of my oldest friends – going back to 8th grade in Modern School, Barakhamba Road. He recently published his first book on Mathematics for kids, titled, Get Smart: Maths Concepts, published by Penguin India. The book also has an associated blog – though it is rather sparsely populated with posts at this moment. This makes him the third school friend of mine to have written a mathematics related book. How cool is that! Congratulations Gaurav!

You can read about the other two authors and their book here.

Political debates are heavily analyzed – by pundits and laypeople alike. I had my own minor visual contribution to this discourse through this WordMap/Cloud of the third and final debate between McCain and Obama . Such wordmaps are fun to create and see but are not terribly insightful. Yes you can see that Obama used the word “see” more often than McCain but how far does that really take you in terms of interpreting and making sense of the campaign. And then comes this! Read the rest of this entry »

I do not understand David Brooks. Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the NYTimes. For the most part his columns are right-of-the-political wing nuttiness, garbed in some erudite clothing. I am not linking to them here but his past few op-eds suggesting that McCain would make a great president despite the shallow, erratic and negative campaign he has run have become somewhat repetitive and tiresome.

And then, once in a while, when I have just about decided not to read his columns any more, he throws out some really cool and interesting stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Title says it all… check it out.

Here are some links that came up during our discussion today regarding web-based software for education. Read the rest of this entry »

I love visual proofs of mathematical theorems. One visual proof I use quite often in my design courses (CEP817 or CEP917) is a visual proof of the fact that the sum of consecutive odd numbers is a square number.
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Understanding 4D while living in a 3D world.
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A few years ago, as a part of our PT3 project Matt Koehler, Ken Dirkin and I video taped a series of teacher interviews around authentic problem solving in teaching using technology. The teachers were winners of the TAPS (Technology in Authentic Problem Solving) award, an award given by MACUL and MSU. Over the past few months Ken has been working on creating a website to make these videos more accessible.
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In response to my previous posting titled How artists work, Leigh Wolf pointed out a book (Curious Minds: How a child becomes a scientist). I had not heard of this book before and a quick google search led me to this page. Read the rest of this entry »

Maggie Niess has a new piece titled Knowledge Needed for Teaching With Technologies – Call it TPACK published in the spring 08 issue of AMTE Connections. Read the rest of this entry »

My 8 year old daughter, Shreya, came to me the other day and said that she had designed a learning game. I asked her to draw it out for me and here is what she had created.

A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel is a book written by two of my high school friends, Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal. Read the rest of this entry »