Math Workshops for Elementary School Teachers

The Mathematics Department at Vancouver Island University (VIU) will present two workshops for Elementary School Teachers at the February 22, 2010 PD Day Workshop for SD68 and SD69 teachers at Dover Bay.

There will be two workshops: A Problem Solving Workshop during the Morning session and Probability / The Beauty of Mathematics Workshop in the afternoon session. Both workshops are content based and do not attempt to teach pedagogy. The workshops are aimed at helping Elementary School Teachers to catch up with their Mathematics.

The Problem Solving workshop will be presented by Dr. David Bigelow (a Mathematics Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department at VIU) and Dr. Valerie Watts (a Mathematics Professor at VIU). The workshop is aimed at helping Elementary School Teachers improve their problem solving techniques in Mathematics. The workshop will explore a variety of light-hearted puzzles and problems that are both fun and educational.

The Probability / The Beauty of Mathematics workshop will be presented by Patrick Ng, Eric Agyekum and Dr. Jacobus Swarts. The workshop will be in two parts; for the first hour, we will look at some of the fascinating ideas and facts in Mathematics and talk a little about Probability. Dr. Swarts will talk about “Information Theory” - a discipline that uses ideas from probability and forms the foundation of our modern digital world in the last half-hour.

Whether you are crazy about math or math makes you crazy, these workshops have something for you.

The Mathematics Department (at VIU) organized a similar workshop for high school teachers in 2009. The feedbacks from the workshop were very positive.