"Learning with Alisha!" helps kids learn geometry

Yep, I can think of a few ideas... :) I think Alisha and I should talk!

I will be sure to pass her site along to the teachers I work with. Thanks Alice for the post!

If she's interested to talk with another 'science business', she's welcome to email. US law on children's products also changed quite a bit this month.

Thanks for the post, Alice!

I appreciate the supportive comments as well, Gina and Sara. I will get in touch with each of you next week.

One thing that has been very interesting about marketing this product is people's reactions to the color - pink. They keep asking if I have them in another color, "not that I have anything against pink, honestly!" Simply asking for another color is direct evidence that sexism is alive and well in the USA. :-) Pink is definitively associated with female and most people would prefer a different color. The color jars people somehow. Although no one has come up to me and said "I'm sexist and I hate pink," the consistant questioning of the color demonstrates the cultural/societal sexism that is pervasive, but hidden to most folks.

I've been gently responding, pointing out that by avoiding red, green, blue, and black, the colors of most overhead markers all show up on the pink color, even yellow. So students can draw angle bisectors, drop perpendiculars, etc. with differently color markers. At the end of class, all the marks erase with a damp paper towel.

My dad has a different tactic -- he references breast cancer support, which "works" in an interesting way with other men, especially of his age. :-) (Almost) any route to the goal? (* that's a deep question for a Friday evening! *)

This is cool, but I don't think not liking pink is sexist. Honestly, it just makes me nauseous. I got really sick as a kid from bubblegum flavored penicillin and I hated taking pink bismuth. Gross. That particular shade of pink just brings back those memories. Nothing sexist at all. Just don't like it. Good luck.

I'm not an elementary school teacher, so I don't know for sure, but is there really a market for paying $9 for a triangular (or whatever shape) piece of fiberboard?

Colors can different meanings to different people for all sorts of reasons. I can see why some people wouldn't like pink that might have nothing to do with gender roles.. Say like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_triangle

While there are lots of examples of math being taught in a way that is more accessible to boys, it doesn't seems like the basic geometry concepts covered by these shapes were among them.

The Pink Polygons is not a product which is supposed to make math more fun or availble to girls and I don't think basic geometry is taught in a sexist way any more than any other math topic. The need for them arose in real classrooms where teachers were struggling to draw transformations of polygons on the board.
The manipulatives that are currently available to teach geometric shapes are very small (about an inch in diameter), are limited in diversity (equilateral triangle, square, isosc trapezoid, rhombus, and octagon), and are differently colored (e.g. a triangle is green). We think is it possible that the different colors are the first characteristic students use to identify the shape, so we decided to make ours all the same color. The currently available shapes are green, tan, yellow, orange, and red, which doesn't leave too many choices that are different from the available ones.
Of course not every woman likes pink, just like not every man likes blue. No need to essentialize. However, I think the overall reaction to the pink color is much stronger than it would be if we had chosen green.
Whether there is a market for them remains to be seen. :-)

I am a big believer in using a variety of tools/techniques to make math accessible to all kids. I tend to have a better ability to grasp new concepts visually, these seem like something that would have been great for me. The color doesn't threaten me, but my (lack of) taste tends toward the bold and bright rather than the subtle and muted.

Tangentially, I know that a common difference is that girls (tend to) develop language and social skills earlier, and boys (tend to) develop spatial reasoning earlier. I've always attributed the disparity at least partially to socialization.. little girls are more often encouraged to talk and socialize and little boys are more often encouraged to build things. As with most generalities, this one is often not true in specific cases, but it seems plausible that women who do well in male dominated fields like physics and engineering may have been socialized differently. An alternate (though not mutually exclusive) explanation is that they just had (really good) teachers who were able to explain topics in a way that made more sense than the way it is usually taught.

I've often wondered if effectiveness of algebraic vs geometric approaches to certain topics would show a difference for girls and boys. On of my favorite professors in college taught me abstract algebra and number theory. Sometimes she would take an algebraic approach to topics that I thought were more straightforward when approached geometrically (e.g. rotational and transpositional permutations.) When I asked her, she said that the algebraic treatments made more sense to her[*]. I wonder if algebra is closer to language, and therefore more accessible to (most) girls, and geometry is more visual/spatial and therefor more accessible to (most) boys. Of course, all this is anecdotal, and I have no idea if any of it is true, but would love to know if there is any research on the topic.

-- Mitch

[*] Of course, another reason was that the algebraic treatments were more useful in proofs, which is mostly what worked on, but I thought that the geometric treatments provided a better intuitive sense of the topic.