Image of the Week

Asking What’s Missing? in the Real World

Last year, we shared with you a video of some of the many ideas that students might have when tackling the question, What’s missing? with an array that is partially shaded. We encourage you to go back and watch it. We love these array images that we’ve created for all the rich math thinking they can provoke. But that thinking does not have to end with these abstract digital images; we can ask, What’s missing? in the real world, too. Have a look at this week’s image and ask yourself, What’s missing?

You’ll find this image looks a lot like our arrays, but with a few more clues about how to decompose the empty space. Those clues can help students to see the rows and columns where tiles used to be, which can help them to count, either by ones or in groups, the missing tiles. That said, this image also introduces some complexity to the question of what is missing, because there are partial tiles on the left edge of the image, and we can see that the missing (and whole) tiles continue off the edge of the image. How do you account for these? Or do we ignore them? These are reasonable questions to debate, and depending on what you decide “counts,” you will end up with a different answer to the question. We encourage you to embrace this ambiguity, as we so often do, because it allows for a multiplicity of ways of seeing, thinking, and counting.

Give this real world, What’s missing? task a try with your students and see what they see!

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group