The RabbitMath Curriculum

The RabbitMath philosophy is that kids should be working with elegant complex structures, indeed they should be engaged in designing and building them.

Just like a teacher in an English or an Art class, our job is to bring these structures into the classroom and invite the students to reconstruct them, or design and build analogues. We are more interested in stimulating mathematical thinking than in imparting knowledge.

The philosophy for this kind of curriculum runs from Whitehead’s Aims of Education, through Dewey’s Art as Experience to Papert’s Mindstorms. A fundamental activity here is what is called “play” and it’s quite simply how kids learn. Our task is then to give them things that are worth playing with.

Our technical objectives are taken from the Ontario Secondary Curriculum. Our activities are “low-floor high ceiling” in the sense that most of them can work at all grade levels, though different responses could be expected from different grades.

We have a staff of enthusiastic students, Ezri, David, Julia, Becca, Alex, Janny and Mike so there will be lots of opportunity for small-group and one-on-one interaction.

Our updated curriculum of exercises and activities have been subcategorized into topics consistent with the high school curriculum. The problems have been distributed into two levels of sophistication: intermediate and senior. Students in high school have the tools to answer questions of varying sophistication. The tools students use will vary based on their grade level. This is okay! These questions can be solved using many approaches.