For teachers
What a session is, and how to get in
You bring a problem you already teach. Hazel asks what you are trying to achieve before proposing anything, and when you ask it to draft it gives you two labelled options with the trade-off between them named, so you choose rather than accept.
The eight fields
Alongside the conversation you fill in a structured panel. The fields are not neutral scaffolding. They are derived from Maass (2010) and Blum & Leiss (2007), and they are the transitions of the cycle made explicit:
- Real-world context: would the mathematics change if you deleted it?
- The question posed: what the solver is actually asked to do
- Assumptions: what the solver has to decide for themselves
- Data given and data to be sought: what is handed over, and what has to be found, measured or estimated
- Expected mathematical model: the mathematics the task should elicit
- What makes this non-routine: why it is not a dressed-up exercise
- Designer's rationale: your own reasoning, in your words
A panel where the first and last fields are thin, and the middle ones are full, usually describes a computational exercise with a story attached. Hazel will say so.
What happens after you commit a task
A committed task is a version, not an ending. Three things become available the moment you have one.
A version for the class. Hazel writes the same task in student language, with a drawing of the situation and a handful of questions to ask a group that has stopped. You edit it before anyone sees it. It is your class and your wording.
Your own score against the seven criteria. The same rubric a blind rater uses. Once a rater has scored the same task you see both, and the places where you disagree are the interesting ones.
A link a solver can work. Publishing gives you a URL. Whoever opens it sees the situation, the question and the data you gave, and nothing else. Not your assumptions, not the model you expect, not your rationale, since working those out is the task. They move through the seven transitions of the cycle and mark where they get stuck, and that comes back to you stage by stage. Links expire after thirty days and you can withdraw one at any time.
Hazel draws
Ask what a relationship looks like and you get the curve rather than a paragraph describing it. She plots functions, sketches the situation, and flags an assumption where it would otherwise go past unnoticed. This matters more than it sounds: a solver who cannot picture the situation is stuck at the very first transition, and no amount of prose fixes that.
Access is closed, deliberately
There is no sign-up button, and that is not an oversight.
Opening accounts while the study is running would put real identifiers inside an ethics-governed dataset. There are two ways in and the researcher issues both: a participant code on a slip, entered at mathazel.com/enter, if you are taking part in the study; or an invite link if you want to design tasks for your own classes. If you would like to be told when it opens, or you teach pre-service teachers and want to talk about taking part, say so by email.