Play with it. Relax and have fun. It would depend what age their kids were. I'd try to find activities both the parent and kid would enjoy. Katamino is a great game using pentominoes. It doesn't seem like math to most math-averse people. To me …
I agree that teaching people tricks that having nothing to do with the underlying math is a big turnoff. I think there are some things that fall into the trick category that we don't even notice sometimes.
While working on my book, I discovered a …
Hi all, glad to join you here. (This discussion already has so much meat in it, it might take me a while to digest it all!)
I teach math at a community college in California. I've also worked with homeschoolers, and run some math circles, and math …