Imagine that homework help was available at 2 AM.  Piazza is an online collaborative learning tool whose founder, Pooja Nath, was one of 3 women (and 50 men) in Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology.  While the male students worked together, the female students were left to work solo. During her first year at Stanford Graduate School of Business, she launched Piazza to enable students and instructors to post and refine answers online 24/7.  The users and endorsers are mostly engineering professors but this is a great system for any class with problem sets. Scroll down on Piazza's home page to see the testimonials.  The system is easy to set up and monitor.  I will use it to teach Precalculus in the Fall. 

New York Times article on Piazza  

Pooja Nath's story on why she started Piazza

Piazza's Investors 

1. What is the equation of a line?  2. The slope formula?

3. Circumference of a circle?  4. Area of a circle?

Click here for the formulas 

If Math were just formulas then open book exams would be easy!  

Many professors of Math and other technical subjects along with the Professional Engineering licensing exam allow open book exams.

PE Exam Guidelines.

A:  No, Math is much more than formulas.  Applying the formulas is the challenge -- many formulas are tricky (like exponent rules) so examples are best to improve recall.  Progress can be made by thinking about and understanding the formulas.  For example, volume is three dimensional, therefore, the units will be units cubed such as ft cubed or cm^3.  For area , the answer will contain square units and perimeter (or circumference) will be just units. 

 If you have a question that you would like featured, please send an email to Robin.

How many integers less than or equal to 1,000,000 are both perfect squares and perfect cubes?

Answer to July's Brain Teaser: 50 degrees 

July 2011 Brain Teaser Solution