Commentary: Cuisinaire Rod Trains
I was first introduced to using Cuisinaire Rods for combinatorics problems by Rika Spungin, when I first started teaching at Wheelock in 1994. I’ve always found it tricky with these problems to give students enough structure so they can make progress, without telling them how to organize their thinking. Plus, even with a lot of rods, it’s easy to run out if students insist on making physical models of all combinations. In this handout, I gave them a choice of problems, which was helpful. One group got very invested in counting the number of possibilities with three rods, which provided a good lead for the class to make connections with the Handshake Problem. A follow up problem was included in the next study group homework assignment.
Students
pointed out one problem with this sheet in some cases I assume for generalization that
rods can be longer than ten units, and I didn’t make this explicit. I’ll fix this in later editions. 7/05