Make Math Fun for Students! (Using The Number Devil and accompanying software)

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I am a seventh and eighth grade math teacher at a low-income school in the Bronx. Most of my students dislike math because they find it frustrating and incomprehensible. The more time I spend with them, the more it becomes clear to me that this frustration is the result of a very basic lack of number sense. My students have been taught math for years by rote memorization and therefore, even my more successful math students have very little understanding of what any given number actually means or why any given formula actually works. I read “The Number Devil” for the first time about two months ago. It is a collection of 13 short stories about a boy named Robert, who simply hates math. In each story, Robert is visited in his dreams by a creature called a “number devil.” The number devil guides Robert to new mathematical understanding by taking him on fun and exciting adventures. "The Number Devil" makes math comprehensible for students by providing very simple explanations of concepts and examples of why patterns work. It also makes math fun through storytelling and by using whimsical names for dry mathematical vocabulary (for instance, prime numbers are called “prima donna numbers”). Although it is written for middle school students, I found the refreshing explanations of simple mathematical concepts enlightening and gained a new appreciation for many mathematical concepts myself. I would like my students to have the opportunity to learn about math in new ways using this entertaining and engaging book. Many of my students who are frustrated by math will be motivated to more deeply explore mathematical concepts by these stories. In addition, the accompanying software will allow them to immediately practice the concepts discovered in each story through fun and interactive games. I intend to use “The Number Devil” as an end-of-year unit for my seventh grade class. I would like to read to the book with them and have each student create a project about one chapter or topic in the book. Because it contains many pictures and graphics necessary to understand the math, each of my students will need to have their own copy of “The Number Devil” for this project. I will also need one copy of the accompanying software to be installed on computers at my school's technology lab.