The Week of Inspirational Math was created by Jo Boaler from Stanford University to show students how your brain grows through watching videos and working on open and creative work. I believe the whole point of these problems and videos are to help students feel more comfortable getting problems wrong because the brain is growing when you make mistakes.
This is one of the problems we worked on during the Week of Inspirational Math. I started off by thinking about the problem, I didn't just write down a whole bunch of numbers and guesses. I thought for about 5 minutes of strategies I could solve this with. The first thing that popped into my head was factorials, but I couldn't remember if a factorial was addition or multiplication. I then found out that factorials were multiplication and my idea wouldn't work. Then I started working with my table group and they found an equation which is on my paper. x2+x/2, you plug the number of how many squares you have in the very left column into x and the answer is how many individual 1x1 squares are in that square figure. Then we were told to extend one of the problems that we did during the Week of Inspirational Math. I chose this problem because the equation makes the problem so much easier to solve then just counting each square out because that's what I was planning on doing before I started talking with my table group and found the equation. I am going to extend on this problem by solving how many squares a 1,639 tall staircase would have, solve by hand...