My Math Websites Project
by Mia Tognotti
Here is a list of the things I will be looking for in my websites:
Website Criteria:
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Easy to navigate
- A wide range of math concepts
- Games must be entertaining and challenging
- Each concept should have a description
- Descriptions must have simple vocabulary and examples
Here is a website criteria chart
TOPICS 1 STAR 3 STARS 5 STARSAESTHETICS / Not very nice to look at and is laid out very poorly / Kind of pretty to look at and laid out ok / Very aesthetically pleasing and nicely laid out
NAVIGATION / Hard to navigate and challenging to find what you are looking for / A little easier to navigate but still quite difficult to get where you want / Easy to navigate and its simple to find what you want
CONCEPTS / Not very many concepts / Some concepts / A wide variety of concepts
GAMES / Not very many games (or no games at all) and they are not interesting and too easy / Some games but not very interesting and still pretty easy / Lots of fun and challenging games that teach a lot about the subject its based on
DESCRIPTIONS / Little to no descriptions; confusing with no examples or difficult vocabulary / Some descriptions with a couple examples but still some difficult vocabulary / Lots of descriptions with simple vocabulary and lots of examples
These are the websites I have decided to rate:
1. Mathplayground.com
2. Coolmath.com
3. Softschools.com
4. Kidsmathgamesonline
5. Interactivesites.weebly.com
Introduction
For my project, I am rating 5 websites by the criteria I have created. I will go to each site and judge each different category I am criticizing and then make a total score out of 5 stars. Afterwards, I will pick my favourite website and put on the school website.
1. Mathplayground.com
- Not very easy to navigate
- Games are interesting and there are lots of different levels of difficulty
- Not very aesthetically pleasing
- Wide range of concepts
- Easy to understand video descriptions with good examples
Overall I rate this website as 4 stars
Although the games and descriptions were very good, I could not give this site 5 stars because it was not very pretty to look at or easy to find what you are looking for. I think that even though you are on the website to learn math, the first thing you see depends on what you think. So going onto this site the first thing I see is a jumble of games. It was hard to distinguish what’s for what subject with the small titles they have. I don’t trust this site as much as I would if it was spaced and laid out nicer. But the games were very fun and challenging and the videos were very good and I understood what they were trying to teach me. That is why I rate this site as 4 stars. You didn’t have to pay anything to play and learn on this site
2. Coolmath.com
- Very aesthetically pleasing
- Pretty easy to navigate
- I really enjoyed how they had a bunch of links to help with “math anxiety” and “why do you hate math”
- Examples are really good and easy to understand
- Games are fun and challenging
- Lots of different concepts
Overall I rate this website as 5 stars
These are some of the reasons I rated this website 5 stars. First, I really like that as soon as you open the site it shows you all the options right away so you don’t have to keep opening links to get where you want. Also, the games are very fun and they can be very challenging. Another thing is that they dedicated a link on their page to helping people get over fear of math because if someone really hates math, no matter how many games they play they will still hate doing it because most of the time people get mad at a subject when they don’t understand it. Also, they had good, understandable examples that I learned a lot from. That’s why I rated this site as 5 stars. You do not have to pay for this website
3. Softschools.com
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Easy to navigate
- Games aren’t really fun and are too easy
- Descriptions have lots of examples, simple vocabulary and lots of information
Overall I rate this website as 4 stars.
Here are the reasons I rated this site 4 stars. I really enjoyed the descriptions and examples. They were very good and I would recommend this site to anyone who wants to learn a new concept because I understood all of the vocabulary. There were lots of example questions and big bold drawn examples as well. Also, even though this website has lots of subjects other than math, it is very easy to find exactly where you want to go. But, the games were very boring and too easy. So overall, I don’t highly recommend this site if you don’t enjoy math or if you learn math best through games because the games were not good. Also this website is a free website.
4. Kidsmathgamesonline
- Easy to navigate
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Games are not really fun and not too challenging
- Has some description videos but they are not really easy to understand
Overall I rate this website as 4 stars.
What I really enjoyed about this website is as soon as you are on it, you can tell almost immediately where you want to go. There are very bright and bold coloured labels that show you exactly where to go and lots of direction given. So I decided to go to the fractions game as that is the subject I wanted to learn about. I went into the game and I tried to play it. It was very boring and super easy. Also the video descriptions and definitions were pretty good, but you basically had to pause at almost every other sentence and repeat it to fully understand the point they are trying to get across. Also in the videos I felt they depended more on the words than the examples we could see and in my opinion the whole point of a video is to show people what you are trying to explain. This website is free
5. Interactivesites.weebly.com
- Aesthetically pleasing
- Easy to navigate
- Lots of different concepts
- Games are boring and not really challenging
- Doesn't have any descriptions
Overall I rate this website as 2 stars
This website looks really good when you first see it and the concepts are very clearly laid out, but other than that I didn’t really enjoy it. The games weren’t even games, they were just naming and placing things. Also, as far as I could see, there were no descriptions. The reason it got 2 stars is because it had a wide range of concepts and was very aesthetically pleasing. This website is free.
Summary
Overall my favourite website was coolmath.com. The first reason is it met all the standards I wanted with its fun and challenging games, it’s descriptions and its nice looks. Also it had a link for how to deal with math anxiety and math anger and I think that is a very important thing that not many websites have.
Conclusion
The interesting thing I found about this project was how many math concepts there are that I haven’t learned yet. Also, I found that after visiting a website once, the next day I would go to that same site and rate it something completely different, which I think is strange because my opinions change so much within that time frame.
I chose to learn about the subject fractions while rating these websites and this is what I learned:
Fractions
What is a fraction?
A fraction is a number that represents a number that has been divided into equal parts. For example, if you have an apple and you cut it into four pieces, one of those pieces would be one fourth. A fraction is made up of two parts: the numerator and the denominator. The denominator is the bottom part of the fraction. This is the number that represents the whole number. The numerator is the top part of the fraction. It is the number that represents the part of the whole.
Simplifying fractions
When you simplify a fraction you are basically writing another fraction that is equal to the original, just with smaller numbers, for example:
Here is 20/25
Now find a common factor of 20 and 25 by looking for common devisors. In this case 5 is a common divisor: 20 divided by 5 equals 4, and 25 divided by 5 equals 5. So the simplified fraction would be 4/5
Adding and Subtracting Fractions
How do you add fractions? It is easiest to explain by look at an example:
You can see here that if the denominators are the same, all you have to do is add the numerators. This is the same for subtraction, except you are subtracting, not adding.
But if the numerators are different, it will look like this
How you do this is to first find a common denominator. A common denominator is the least common multiple of the two denominators. Then, whatever you do to the denominator you have to do to the numerator (e.g. you can change the 2 on the bottom to a six because 2x3= 6 so now you have to change the numerator 1x3=3). Now simply add the new fractions with the common denominator and adjusted numerators together (3/6+1/6=4/6)
It is the same for subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. The simple steps:
Step 1: Choose a common denominator by calculating the least common multiple of the two denominators.
Step 2: Rewrite the fractions using the common denominator – whatever you do to the denominator you need to do to the numerator.
Step 3: Subtract the numerators and keep the common denominators the same.
For example: 5/6 – 3/4
Step1: Multiples of 4: 4, 8,12, 16, 24 and multiples of 6: 6, 12, 18, 24…12 is the common denominator
Step2: Rewrite the fractions adjusting the numerators to the common denominator
5/6 x2 = 10/12 and 3/4 x3 = 9/12
Step 3: Now subtract 10/12 – 9/12 = 1/12
Once you can find the common denominator, it’s pretty easy.
Multiplying and Dividing Fractions
Now figuring out how to multiply and divide fractions. Here’s the example I am going to use: 7/8 x 1/4
Multiplying fractions is basically the same thing as multiplying whole numbers. When multiplying fractions, you always multiply the numerator before the denominator.
Step 1: multiply the numerators 7 x 1 = 7
Step 2: multiply the denominators: 8 x 4 = 32
So the answer would be 7/32.
Now when dividing fractions you need to consider that multiplication and division are inverse operations; for example, when we divide by 2 we could also multiply by ½. There are two common ways for dividing fractions:
Method one
Using the example: 3/8 divided by 5/11
Step 1: rewrite this question inverting the second fraction: 3/8 x 11/5 = 33/40
Step 2: follow the steps for multiplying fractions, numerators first, then denominators
So the answer is
3/8 divided by 5/11 = 33/40
Method two
For method two you find the common denominator of the fractions and then divide the numerators. Here is an example: 2/3 divided by 1/2
Step 1: rewrite the question with a common denominator:
2/3 = 4/6 and 1/2 = 3/6
Step 2: now divide the numerators:
Mixed Numbers
Mixed numbers are used when you need to count whole things and parts of things at the same time. Here’s an example
If you have ½ and 3 wholes
You would have 3 ½
Adding and Subtracting Mixed Numbers
Now are going to add mixed numbers. Here is the equation we will be working with:
5 ¼ + 3 2/3
Step 1: separate the whole numbers from the fractions into two equations
(5+3) and (1/4 + 2/3)
Step 2: Now add the whole numbers together 5+3=8
Step 3: Add the fractions (as above) find the common denominator, adjust the numerators and add the numerators:
- The common denominator of 1/4 and 2/3 is 12
- The numerators would become 3 and 8 (3/12 and 8/12)
- The numerators added together would be 11/12
Step 4: Now put both the whole numbers and the fractions together as a mixed number: 5 3/12 + 3 8/12 = 8 11/12
The steps for subtracting mixed numbers are very similar to the steps for adding mixed numbers. But, before you work separately with the whole numbers and the fractions, you should get common denominators and make sure that you don’t need to borrow. In the first example, we will not need to borrow.
First an example without borrowing: 8 ½ - 2 1/3
Step 1: get a common denominator. The common denominator for ½ and 1/3 is 6
8 3/6 - 2 2/6 and you can see that you can subtract 2/6 from 3/6 without borrowing so follow the steps as with adding, only subtracting.
Step 2: (as above with adding) separate the whole numbers and subtract 8-2 = 6
Step 3: subtract the fractions 3/6 – 2/6 = 1/6
Step 4: Now rewrite the answer as a mixed number 8 1/2 - 2 1/3 = 6 1/6
Multiplying and dividing mixed numbers
One method for multiplying mixed numbers is to change them toimproper fractions. Using the example above for subtracting: 8 ½ x 2 1/3
Step 1: change the mixed numbers to improper fractions by multiplying the whole numbers by the denominators and adding them to the numerators.
2x8 = 16 then 16+1 = 17 so the improper fraction of 8 ½ is 17/2
3x2 = 6 then 6+1 = 7 so the improper fraction of 2 1/3 is 7/3
Step 2: multiply the numerators: 17x7 = 119
Step 3: multiply the denominators: 2x3 = 6
Step 4: divide the numerator by the denominator to get back to a mixed number
119 divided by 6 = 19 5/6
Dividing can be done the same way remembering the inversion.
Step 1: change the mixed number to an improper fraction
Step 2: invert the second fraction
Step 3: multiply the fractions, numerators first and denominators second
That is what I learned about fractions.