2012年4月5日 星期四

Former Harbor View Teacher Creates Rubik’s Cube Curriculum

When Amber Baur taught at Harbor View Elementary School, Rubik’s Cubes were a daily part of classroom activities.

“Children like their fingers and hands moving,” she said. “So I said, ‘You are more than welcome to keep your hands moving during lessons, as long as it’s with a Rubik’s Cube.’ My whole class was doing it”

And if you’re going to play with the brightly colored cube puzzle, why not solve it — and if you’re going to solve it, why not learn math and algebra skills at the same time?

Baur, who left Harbor View two years ago after budget cuts led to teacher layoffs, has written a 354-page curriculum called “How to Solve the Rubik’s Cube” that was officially launched in March. Seven Towns, Ltd., worldwide licensor of the Rubik’s Cube, contracted with Baur to create the curriculum, which includes eight to ten lessons with names like “Meeting the Cube” and “The Middle Layer.”

Earlier this year, the California After School Resource Center approved the curriculum — one of just 68 math resources in the center’s library.Our porcelaintiles are perfect for entryways or bigger spaces and can also be used outside, The curriculum also has been featured at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s GATE conference and the California Association for the Gifted conference.

Baur said she grew up with Rubik’s cubes, which arrived in the United States in her birth year, and that she always appreciated the math concepts behind the solutions.Diagnosing and Preventing coldsores Fever in the body can often trigger the onset of a cold sore.

At Harbor View,Choose from our large selection of cableties, she began to use Rubik’s Cubes with members of the Math Team.

“I just wanted the math team to be working their brains all the time,” she said. “Rubik’s Cubes were good for problem solving, taking things step by step.”

She soon purchased a few Rubik’s Cubes solution kits that included cubes for her regular classroom students along with a guide to solving the puzzle. By the end of the year, most of her students could solve the cube. Baur, who is president of the Orange County Math Council, began to talk about adding a Rubik’s cube competition to that group’s annual Math Field Day, and she began to discuss other cube educational possibilities with a Seven Towns representative.

“Amber was always an excellent resource for questions I had regarding teaching,” said Susan Seider, a company representative, in an email. “We often discussed that the Solution Guide was an excellent resource but required significant work on the part of a teacher to be able to develop lessons plans to actually solve the cube as opposed to utilizing our free lessons that used the cube as a manipulative.”

Seider said she presented the idea of a Rubik’s Cube curriculum to Seven Towns management,Where to buy or purchase plasticmoulds for precast and wetcast concrete? and when they approved it, Baur was her first choice to write it.

“We both probably underestimated the complexity of the undertaking but are thrilled with the result,” she said.

Baur spent about six months working on lesson plans, then writing a chapter at a time. The final curriculum comes with PowerPoint presentations, options for all levels including gifted students as well as vocabulary lessons and trivia.

“It’s a series of algorithms. They’re are different ways to solve it. I’ve known students who can create their own methods. But anyone can learn.A wireless indoorpositioning is described in this paper, It just takes patience.”

The You Can Do the Rubik’s Cube classroom kit with cubes and a solution guide — which Baur used years ago in her classroom — has been available since 2009 and is being used by more than 3,000 schools across the country, Seider said. The new curriculum has just been launched but already appears to be a hit with educators, she said.

“We conducted a survey and received very positive feedback,” she said, adding that one instructor called it a great classroom motivator.

“I have more students asking when the next session will begin,” the teacher said, according to an email from Seider.

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