November 7, 2013

Nix: Ratios and Proportional Reasoning Chapter

I've realized that while I'm pretending to do NaNoWriMo, it's a week in and I have 2,426 "words" typeset (let's not talk about how many of those are numbers or symbols). Anyone who manages to write 50,000 words in a month is seriously impressive! Still, I have made progress that I want to share. I started with Chapter 2, because I can (and I have a soft spot for proportional reasoning). It has taken a lot of tinkering to figure out how I want to format this thing, but I have something I think I like. Right now I'm working in full page mode, which is good for printing but not a whole lot else. The back of my mind is swirling with eBook and tablet friendly formats, but I'm trying to focus on getting the whole thing typed first. So, without further ado, Chapter 2:




Things I'm excited about: 
Clickable links! (referring back to previous sections, the table of contents - not pictured - and linking to math mistakes)
Words wrapping around images (magic!)

Things I'm wondering about: 
Does it read smoothly?
Are the reasons convincing and the alternatives do-able?
I accidentally made an image set for multiplying fractions when I meant to do addition, so I added in the rectangular array method even though there isn't a trick for that (that I know of). Worth including?

Things I changed:
I didn't feel that Least Common Denominator qualified as a trick, I still included a passage about it which uses all the language we had previously, but it doesn't get a title anymore.
I created illustrations for each trick (with colors! yay keynote!) because there are so many names for tricks that I wanted it to be completely clear what we were talking about.

Up next: 
Michael Fenton is the awesomest! He typed Chapter 1: Operations and Algebraic Thinking into LaTeX so I will be elaborating on and formatting that one next.

I thought you would be able to leave comments on a pdf in google drive like you can any other google doc, but apparently not. Feel free to comment here or tweet me with thoughts. I really want this to be as peer edited as possible. So grammar to content, I'd love your feedback on all of it.

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