Home » Partners & Parents » Websites for Kids » Math can be fun: Even you can have fun with mathematics

Math can be fun: Even you can have fun with mathematics

© Wayne Dawe

(Note: The Internet is a dynamic place and web sites can come and go quite quickly. This is one of my older and some of the links may not work anymore. If you find that this is the case I invite you to look at some of my more recent articles. My links section has my favorite links from past articles and is checked regularly for non working links. Wayne)

This week I'm going to attempt to prove to you that math isn't all dry and boring. I wish that when I was studying math in school some of the great resources that are spread around the World Wide Web were available to me, maybe I would have done better in calculus. The most definitive site I found in my explorations was Mathematics archives - Topics in Mathematics. This site has topics in all areas of mathematics which are also keyword searchable. Topics are graded by the education level to which they are targeted. To make your searching a little easier I have published the search results for the kindergarten to grade six targeted articles and the references suitable for high school students. To get these results I used the keywords k6.gif and hs.gif in the search function. Another good thing to remember is that articles marked with the INT or JAVA symbol are interactive and may be more interesting places to start. A few of the sites I found particularly interesting are Interactive Mathematics Online, Living Mathematics - The Interactive Texts Project and Welcome to Megamath.

One mathematical game I found that really requires no math skills is Copycat. This Java based game challenges the player to recreate a pattern by rotating a cube with different symbols on each face and placing the symbols on a grid in the least number of moves.

Another interesting area of mathematics is cellular automata. One type of cellular automata is illustrated by John Conway's game of life. This game involves placing pieces on a grid and then seeing what happens based on the rules of the game. Too many neighbors and a piece is removed, not enough and off it goes too. To learn more about the game of life go to Paul's page of Conway's Life Miscellany. This page has links to other Conway's life pages a copy of the rules and our useful information. Two links that are particularly interesting are a Java implementation of the game you can play on-line and for those whose browsers don't support Java a Game of Life implementation that works with check-boxes. It has a much smaller gameboard than the Java version but allows you to get the

The copyright of the article Math can be fun: Even you can have fun with mathematics in Websites for Kids is owned by Wayne Dawe. Permission to republish Math can be fun: Even you can have fun with mathematics in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.