Maths is about problem solving

Maths teaching in many schools relies on pupils learning the routines for completing calculations. While there is nothing wrong with this, it represents a narrow approach to learning maths. Maths is about solving problems based on reasoning and logic. The routines are simply known methods for taking particular types of information and producing from them a logical result, that is, they are short cuts to save the mathematician from having to do all the hard work of reasoning. However, for the children who are learning these routines, it hardly seems that they are there to make life easier, from the child's point of view the routines themselves are hard work. Knowinng no diffferently, the child believes that the routines comprise maths. Thus maths becomes divorced from both logical reasoning and the real world, it becomes an abstract discipline that the child is tortured with for no apparent good reason, and they learn to hate the subject. At Puppet Maths we intend to reverse this process, our purpose is to get children reasoning, using logic and using maths to solve problems. Yes, they have to learn the routines as well, but we explain them using reason and logic and methods of visualisation that are possible in our magical puppet world, but which are difficult to explain on a board by a teacher in a classroom, or which would appear abstract if explained without the characterisation provided by the puppets.