Project PRIME

Project PRIME

Promoting Resources for the use of Inquiry
throughout Mathematics Education

Note: Project PRIME has developed into the larger "Discovering the Art of Mathematics" project. The resources of Project PRIME remain as they were circa 2009. We encourage you to visit "Discovering the Art of Mathematics" for the continuation of the work begun by this project.

Mission

We believe that inquiry must be a fundamental part of all of mathematics teaching and learning for this education to be lasting and meaningful. To this end, Project PRIME works to provide a variety of resources to enable and encourage teachers to use inquiry in their classrooms.

What is Inquiry?

We believe that students must be active, involved, inquiring, and constructing to be successful learners of mathematics. How exactly this happens is highly context dependant – on the student, the teacher, the mathematical content, the curricular demands, class size, etc.

Many different flavors of inquiry have been proposed: problem based learning, inquiry based learning, guided discovery learning, the Moore method, and many others. We respect and admire the many efforts of proponents to articulate and implement their specific approach. Here we will be less formal in defining inquiry because we think all of these traditions share an underlying spirit that must be celebrated and nurtured.

We encourage you to integrate what you can from these fine traditions into your pedagogy and epistemology – convinced that it will lead to positive student learning.

Project PRIME is supported in part by a generous gift from Harry Lucas.

© The material which makes up this Internet site is copyright 2009 by Julian Fleron, Phil Hotchkiss, Volker Ecke, Christine von Renesse.