The Importance of Teaching and Modeling Good Visual Thinking
 

Thursday, January 26th
4:00 p.m. in New Science Facility 1209

 

Your car, piled high with luggage, comes to a hill that is a mile up and a mile back down. You drive up at 30 mph.  How fast do you have to drive down so that your average speed for the whole trip--up and down--is 60 mph?

This easily understood problem is used as a vehicle (double-entendre noted and therefore intended) for illustrating the importance of visual thinking in mathematics.   The talk reinforces the lesson from the last colloquium talk of last semester that modeling good use of visual thinking in mathematics is too important to be left to mathematics educators alone but is something we all need to do. by John Kiltinen Professor Emeritus NMU Mathematics and Computer Science