Abstract:

Solving linear equations with 2 integer unknowns is a standard theme in the mathematics curricula at both elementary and secondary schools. The aim of this article is to emphasize the effectiveness of the Wolfram Notebooks that use all the power of the Wolfram Language and the Wolfram Notebook system in the cloud. Students (and all other people) could visit such notebooks like any webpage, except all automatically start to be alive and allow all kinds of interaction.

There is a consensus among the mathematics education community of the crucial role of the software as a support system in the teaching of mathematics across grades nowadays. And that is why our approach to the solving Chicken McNugget Theorem (McDonald's sold its nuggets in packs of 9 and 20 and people were curious to find the largest number of nuggets that could not have been bought with these packs) by means of Wolfram Cloud environment is possible and even desirable in a sense.

Namely, there are functions (like “Manipulate”) that enable automatically setting up interactive user interfaces in notebooks with sliders and these are automatically active in published cloud notebooks. As this article shows, such experience can be extended to include a transition from a computationally driven conjecturing to a formal proof based on a number of simple yet useful techniques.

Keywords:

Wolfram Cloud, Wolfram Notebook, Teaching of Mathematics, Linear Equations, Linear Diophantine Equations, Chicken McNugget Theorem.