This is pretty cool. The Center for Asian American Media has produced a series of short videos that use cultural and artistic diversity -- and a little bit of ukulele -- to teach middle school math lessons.
Learn Middle School Math with CAAM and PBS LearningMedia
The 2-5 minute videos were produced, written and directed by Kar Yin Tham, CAAM's director of education initiatives, who says she wanted to make diversity "the central starting point" in the lessons.
"The challenge was to figure out what math concepts were inherent in each artistic or cultural tradition, and how to best present them. To accomplish this, we collaborated with math educators, artists, musicians, and community based organizations."
Some of the collection's highlights include:
Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro demonstrates the relationship between music and math:
Fencing Junior Olympian Kaitlyn Tran uses math and division to show how she can win a match:
Graffiti artist Scape Martinez using math to plan how much paint he needs for a mural.
Each 2-5 minute video, part of PBS LearningMedia's educational collection, comes with lesson plans and activities, and are aligned with the new Common Core standards. For further information, go here. To see all of the CAAM-produced videos in the collection, go here.