In the Dog House
Comments (2)Sorry, I have not been keeping up with my Chinese New Year’s resolution to post once a week. I need your help to prod me when you realize we haven’t had a post for a while.
This is also a big week for my personal Chinese new year’s resolution. It was to beat my time from last year in the JP Morgan race on Thursday. I’ll be running along with about 100+ teachers from SAS on 11,000 others Thursday at 6:00. We start on the Esplanade bridge and finish in front of the F-1 pits. I’ve been training by running to school in the morning a couple days per week. If I look exhausted on Friday, you’ll know why.
Several of you have been asking all year long about when we get to build the dog houses. Well, the time has arrived. You can start designing tonight if you want. They are due next Friday. Check out this doggy mansion!
You’ll need to know several different formulas for surface area and vlume of solids to successfully complete the project. Here is a video showing how to calculate the surface area of a shape almost everyone will have in their dog house– a prism.
Have fun with your dog houses. Be creative, but remember it’s a math project, so the most important thing is that your calculations are accurate.
Tesselate!
I hope you have already created an original fundamental region for your Tesselation Project. Here is a cool website that will create a tesselation for you from a shape that you design. You can then copy or clip the tesselation into paint and add your own details to it or print it. Here’s the link. Give it a try.
Happy Pi Day
Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating Pi Day in class and at lunch, but Pi Day is actually on Sunday, March 14th. It’s celebrated on March 14th because the first three digits of Pi are 3.14, which when written as a date would be 3/14. If you want to get even more precise, you can celebrate “Pi Minute” on 3/14 at 1:59 or “Pi Second” at 1:59:23. I suggest you do it at 1:59 p.m. and not 1:59 a.m. Your parents might get a bit angry if you wake them up shouting “Happy Pi Minute” and “Happy Pi Second” in the middle of the night!
In some parts of the world, Pi Day is celebrated on July 22nd. Can you figure out why? And what does that have to do with Archimedes, the guy who I wrote about a couple of weeks ago? Post a comment with the correct answers before Pi Minute Singapore time and you’ll earn two bonus points for homework!
Here’s a list of some things you can do to celebrate Pi with family on Sunday.
1. Go for a Pi hike (3.14 km).
2. Bake your favorite pi(e) or pi cookies. You can decorate it with the pi smbol.
3. Write a Pi-ku: a poem with 3 lines. First line has 3 words. Second line has 1 word and the third line 4 words.
4. Eat pi-neapple.
5. Go out for pi-zza.
Greetings from Mumbai
Sorry I missed class on Thursday and Friday, but I’ve been away at a conference in Mumbai, India. The conference is all about using laptops and tablets in the classroom. At the American School here every single student from grade 6-12 brings their own tablet to every class every day. In grades K-5 each student has a tablet that is kept in class that they use every day. The classrooms look very muck like ours at SAS except instead of carrying zipperbags, pencil cases, folders and notebooks to classes, they bring their tablets and stylus. What looks different are some of the activities that can take place when every single student has a tablet in their hands during class. I’ll give you a few examples of some neat stuff I’ve seen.
I was in an RLA class where the students were doing lit circles. Each lit circle had set up a ning about their book. They didn’t need the ning to communicate with each other about the book, but it allowed them to communicate with other groups in other classrooms and other schools about the book. They had even invited the authors to join their nings and a few of them had joined the ning and become active members of it. How exciting would it be to have Rick Riordan personally chat with you about Lightning Thief or have Cornelia Funk respond to your post about Inkheart?
I was in a math class where they were going over homework problems from the previous class. Instead of a traditional set of HW problems, the teacher had posted the problems on Google Wave, a new Google app that allows groups of people from multiple computers to work on the same project. The problems were very challenging and required that the students work together and share ideas; however, the students were not together in the same class. They were all at their own homes but working and communicating together in the “wave.”
Now I want to get some feedback from you. How do you think a program like this would work at SAS? Can you imagine an environment where everyone has a laptop in class instead of traditional notebooks and paper? What do you see as some possible benefits or problems of switching to a system like that? Please post your ideas so your classmates and I can see them.
Numberopedia
Mrs. Hill sent me a link to this amazing website a while back called Archimedes’ Labarotory. Since you are in the middle of studying ancient Greece in social studies, I thought it would be a good time to share this with you. Archimedes was one of the greatest mathematicians in history. You may have read about him in your social studies text. He died during the Roman siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE. There are two stories about how he was killed by a Roman soldier, and they are both equally interesting. It’s impossible to tell which, if any, is the true account, but they both demonstrate Archimedes’ devotion to mathematics.
The first story realtes that Archimedes was totally engrossed in a mathematical problem when the soldier arrived at his house. When the soldier ordered him to stop what he was doing and report to the Roman general, Archimedes refused. The Roman soldier was insulted and killed Archimedes. His last words were reported to be “Do not disturb my circles,” a reference to the problem he was working on.
The second story agrees with the first that Archimedes was engrossed in a math problem when the soldier arrived at his house and ordered him to report to the Roman general. Archimedes refused to leave his house without taking his math tools with him. The soldier was suspicious of the tools and demanded that Archimedes “disarm” himself. When Archimedes still refused, he killed him.
You never thought math could be so dangerous, did you? Actually, the website isn’t about Archimedes himself; it’s just got some really cool math stuff. The part I like the best is the Numberopedia. This is similar to an encyclopedia except all the entries are numbers. It gives cool facts, trivia and relationships about numbers from zero to a brazillion– something math geeks like us can get lost in for hours! For example, I looked up two of my favorite numbers– 58 and 85. I learned that they are the only pair of two-digit reversible hoax numbers. I hadn’t ever heard of hoax numbers before. Check out your favorite numbers and find out something cool about them.
Here’s the link: http://www.archimedes-lab.org/numbers/Num1_69.html
Man vs. Beast
I found this great video of a real man vs. beast race. I know a lot of you have chosen the cheetah as one of the animals to compare yourselves to, so you should appreciate this. Can you figure out how much the cheetah would beat you by in a similar race? How much of a head start would you need to finish in a tie with the cheetah?
What’s This All About?
Hey, guys. Welcome to my math blog. This is a place for me to share some cool stuff about math with you that we don’t always have time to get to in class. It’s also a place where you can piggyback on what I post with feedback of your own. From time to time I might make visiting and responding to the blog a required homework assignment, but most of the time it will just be sharing neat ideas and links. I’m a beginner at this blog stuff, so please feel free to give me some tips on how to jazz things up. Hope you enjoy!
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