Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Article from the Airdrie Echo

An Airdrie father and son have combined specialties to develop a small business which creates and distributes an innovative educational product.

Greg Lammiman, a retired teacher, joined forces with son Dallas Lammiman, a talented 20-year-old filmmaker, to form Movie Makers – an Airdrie based operation that recently completed its second of two educational films for children.

"Subitize Me: Amazing Math" is a 20-minute adventure film starring 12-year-old Airdrie twins, which focuses on the fundamental math skill, subitizing.

Subitizing is mandated in the new math curriculum, but for most people, including teachers, it's a term we have never heard before, Greg said.

"Subitizing is quite simple," he added.

"It means to quickly see how many without counting.

"Perceptual subitizing is when you instantly see one group of objects, such as dots on a dice."

An individual can only subitize up to five or six objects in this way.

Greg said perceptual subitizing is when you quickly combine numbers of objects to arrive at the total.

"When you see seven on a domino, you may recognize six as on a dice, then see one more and arrive at seven," he added.

So with Greg's skill set as an educator and Dallas's creativity, they went to work on the project that took 18 months to complete....

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