Ask HN: Good Teaching Materials for Precalculus Mathematics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good Teaching Materials for Precalculus Mathematics?

1 pointtokenadult3 comments

I'm looking for online teaching materials for learners of secondary school mathematics, generally any subject from what is called "prealgebra" in the United States (topics such as ratios and proportions, simple use of literal variables, coordinate graphing, etc., which are often late elementary topics in other countries) to "precalculus" (trigonometry, functions, matrices, and other school mathematics that precedes calculus instruction). I'll share some examples of good exposition with thought-provoking problems in a comment to this post, and I welcome all of you to share more suggestions. I observe that many HN participants who have children are eager to make sure their children have a good mathematical education.

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Browsing around the Web, I've found a number of useful materials young learners or for their teachers about the mathematics that Americans might consider "middle school" or "high school" mathematics. Here are some examples of downloadable materials:

An amazingly clear and thoughtful textbook from the state government of Kerala, India, available not only in the English version linked below, but also in Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada.

http://www.education.kerala.gov.in/englishmedium/mathseng/te...

A guide for teachers to the most critical issues in mathematics education at the early secondary school level.

http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/

The Mathematics Pre-service Teachers Need to Know is a detailed discussion of how teachers of even earlier topics can get ready to lay a good foundation for learners to learn secondary school mathematics topics.

http://hub.mspnet.org/index.cfm/13083

The Singapore Math series cover these topics well. The various textbook publishers have permitted some sample pages to be shown from sublinks on the North American distributor's website.

http://www.singaporemath.com/Secondary_math_s/22.htm

Some college-level teachers who teach prealgebra topics in remedial classes have put together impressive lecture notes.

http://ms.yccd.edu/~jb2/Prealgebra/fm.pdf

What other resources like this do you like?

You could try Khan's academy, it is very cool IMHO. http://www.khanacademy.org/index.html#Pre-algebra

For teaching materials, try cnx

http://cnx.org/content/col10615/latest/

I would try out something in the LOGO philosophy also (scratch, etoys and so forth). The web is flowing with rich material, so get a shovel and dig up.

I Hope you find some gems.

Here's a favorite of mine I loved visiting when I was in middle school: http://coolmath.com

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