No one way to skin a cat

If mathematics is all about problem solving, then most problems can be approached from a variety of different directions. There is no one single way of solving most problems, usually there are a number of valid paths for arriving at a solution. This is not how maths is taught in school. The teacher, faced with a class of 30 pupils and a time constraint cannot normally afford to let the pupils develop different ways of solving problems, the teacher simply does not have the time to devote to understanding how each pupil approached the problem and to judge if it is a valid one based on sound logic, or if it is flawed, working out in what way it is so. As a result, the teacher enforces a standardised way of tackling problems, thereby crushing the imagination that is the essence of mathematics.
Sir Barnes Wallis, designer of the Wellington bomber and inventor of the bouncing bomb which was used on the Dambusters raid in 1943, used to praise his mathematics education as the foundation of his whole career. This was not just because it gave him the tools to work at the forefront of engineerinng, but because it taught him how to think about problems, how to approach them and how to solve them. He was taught maths by means of a heuristic method. For example, the class he was in was taught how to use a pair of compasses and then armed with that instrument and a ruler instructed to go away and find out everything they could about circles. Two weeks later the pupils came back with a number that was just over 3, which was a constant relating to all circles. Unfortunately, schools do not have the luxury of the time that is needed to undertake heuristic education, today's crowded curriculum does not allow for pupils to learn problem solving through exploration.
Puppet Maths attempts to reverse this trend by teaching maths through logical reasoning and imaginative visualisation. It presents many different ways of approaching problems to let the pupil know that there is no single correct way of tackling a problem, that they are not on a tightrope from which a false step will cause disaster, but that there are many appropriate ways to solve maths problems.