Maths and you guessed it... Christmas

Here is a gift for you from Mathsland - a game. It's the latest thing and Jo Boaler of Stanford likes it so much she is now on the team..

Download Mathbreakers and puzzle it out. It looks like Mathbreakers will just keep growing too.

And this ancient game - I haven't beaten the computer yet. Can you? Cool Math - Mancala

For the next game you will need a 10 by 10 grid - this is called How Close to 100? To make it more challenging try How Close to 1 and use decimals. This is from Jo Boaler.

You will need

• two players

• two dice

• recording sheet

This game is played in partners. Two children share a blank 100 grid. The first partner rolls two number dice.

The numbers that come up are the numbers the child uses to make an array on the 100 grid. They can put the array anywhere on the grid, but the goal is to fill up the grid to get it as full as possible. After the player draws the array on the grid, she writes in the number sentence that describes the grid. The second player then rolls the dice, draws the number grid and records their number sentence. The game ends when both players have rolled the dice and cannot put any more arrays on the grid. How close to 100 can you get?

Variation Each child can have their own number grid. Play moves forward to see who can get closest to 100. 

Sound Waves Circular Motion Water Coolness from 9gag

24-Hz sound wave collides with water

Click this link to the 9gag video - very cool

Click the link and watch what sound waves do to water

From the people at 9gag and thanks to Annalis in G09 for sharing it with me.

what is the white rectangle doing there? I don't know - I'll fix that this weekend (:

Landing a Rocket on a Comet. Happening in the next 12 hours...

Landing on the moon - done
Landing a robot on Mars - done

Landing on a comet is a little trickier. Why? What do you think?

Why are we trying to do it?

Find out here

Follow it live from the people at NASA right HERE

FINALLY! FLYING CARS

They have been talking about these forever. Many other things have come to be that were only crazy future ideas when I was a kid like...

THIS CRAZY DREAM CAME TRUE
Imagine if you could see the person you were calling on the phone and have a face to face conversation no matter where you were in the world. Hello Skype and some similar type face to face communication technology.

WE ARE STILL WAITING FOR:
We are still waiting for time travel (Alina make it happen!) but I heard the other day that the conjecture is travel into the past is impossible but other dimensions... why not?

Teleportation is being worked on by the Entanglement Generation, I kid you not.

RECENT HAPPENING
What has happened as far as dreams beginning to come true and THE FUTURE IS NOW type of stuff?

THE FLYING CAR - YAY and, quite frankly, about time.

Read about it here in The Guardian and WATCH THE VIDEO TOO



"AeroMobil flying car prototype 3 is ready 8 | wordlessTech." 2014. 30 Oct. 2014 <http://wordlesstech.com/2014/10/10/aeromobil-flying-car/aeromobil-flying-car-prototype-3-is-ready-8/>

Your Life on Earth - cool interactive from the BBC

Your life on earth

Enter your details and this cool interactive will show you some of the things that have happened in your life time.

Enjoy!

BBC Earth Story Right Here

and while I am here this is pretty cool too:
World Population and Me

From The Good People at the Guardian Data Blog

Data data data - it's the information age your data is being harvested right now. Somewhere someone is using technology to record that you are reading this blog post. If they can they will also record any metadata they can too. 

You work with data too and it's important to know what all those terms mean - download speed, bits, bytes, Mbps and MBps. 

Have you downloaded or uploaded in different countries? Check out this cool visualisation of various speeds and quality of the internet - you can change the countries...

Have fun!

Download deathmatch: compare internet speed worldwide

Cat photo by Flickr user wenlian chen

source:  "Download deathmatch: compare internet speed worldwide ..." 2013. 14 Oct. 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/dec/15/compare-internet-speed-worldwide>

pi 10 Trillion of its Digits - actually only 4 Million of them...

It took 371 days of computing TEN TRILLION decimal places of pi.
Doesn't sound impressive - that requires 44 TB of disk to find them and 7.6 TB to store them, when compressed.

In 1949 the ENIAC computer took 70 hours to calculate pi to 2037 digits.

Check out the Beautiful visualisation and effort in this very cool site and more on how long it would take humans to say all of these digits.

http://two-n.com/pi/

Why do we care? Because this number is everywhere, because it has no pattern, because they say inside these digits are all of our phone numbers, birth dates and every possible combination you could think of. BECAUSE humans and other animals need patterns to understand the world around them. pi is a beautiful mystery and mathematicians like you love puzzles.



"An average person can read out approximately 120 digits ..." 2012. 13 Oct. 2014 <http://www.two-n.com/pi/>

Rays of Light and The Lunar Eclipse TODAY

Wednesday Evening's Rare 'Impossible' Lunar Eclipse

Check out the Blood Moon this evening. Hopefully the clouds won't cover it. 

6:13pm for Phuket

Here is a clip from NASA

Watch in more detail here from NASA. 

Nobel Prize goes to THE HEXAGON (and some persistent scientists)

"Neuroscience: Brains of Norway : Nature News & Comment." 7 Oct. 2014 <http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-brains-of-norway-1.16079>

Edvard and May-Britt Moser have been working together for 30 years. For 28 of those years they have also been married. 

These two scientists embody the learner profiles and show us how persistence, resilience and problem solving can lead to success. Not only that but mistakes along the way helped them to unravel the mystery of how our brains map out our environments. People are now calling it the GPS of our brains.

They have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with neuroscientist John O’Keefe at University College London (their former supervisor).

There is no Nobel Prize for Maths as we have discussed in class, but the mathematics is everywhere. Here in our brains wonderful hexagons form the way we sense location.

Please read more about it in the Scientific American and in Nature Magazine. Very exciting brain research! 

Very Cool New Thing - check it out

http://webdemo.myscript.com/#/demo/analyzer

This does amazing things with stuff you do by hand. Have a play and see...

from this 

 to this

and this - write in the equation and Desmos graphs it. Nice!

Exciting Space News - Women of India (and some men)

Check out this article about "Nandini Harinath, 44, a physicist and a mother of two, was the deputy operations director of the Mars mission - in other words, she was the person "operating" the spacecraft between Earth and Mars."

Article Here

Image and text from the BBC
original link from Amy Poehler's Smart Girls on Facebook. 

Does 1 = 0.9999...?

Ask yourself the question first. What do YOU think about the question and why?

How about the other ninths?

Once you have puzzled over this question, please enjoy the following two videos from Numberphile and Vi Hart, two legends.

Puzzling needs to take at least five minutes.

Also, DP students, the previous post is very new with you in mind. All others are very welcome.

Vi Hart

Numberphile

teeny and HUGE Numbers

In Diploma Mathematical Studies we are starting the course looking at the story of Number and how we communicate all sorts of things with different types of Numbers.

You are all probably familiar with Natural Numbers and Integers but there are also Rational, Real and Imaginary numbers. When society needs more from mathematics to push through and develop in some way we develop new systems to make that possible.

Number types tell the story of society and its complexity.

Check out these sites:
FSU (where my dad did his doctorate) and their famous Powers of ten
and this famous video - it's old but the numbers are relevant



We have had these types of numbers in this blog before. Please visit or revisit for your mathematical enjoyment about the scale of the universe(s).

CLICK right here

Number Sense - Thanks Ajarn Dale

Hey there maths fans!

Ajarn Dale sent on some cool "Math Tricks". Some people think that these tricks are cheating, but in actual fact it's about understanding numbers and being able to make them work for YOU.

Check them out here in wisebread.com - thanks Ajarn Dale.
11 useful math tricks

Numbers in a City: New Haven / 1997 / SML by See-ming Lee licensed under CC by A SA

Maryam Mirzakhani - my new hero

This is a wonderful article about Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female recipient of the Fields Medal. Thanks to Ajarn Krysten for sharing this with me.

She used to think she couldn't do mathematics. Everyone can do mathematics.

Read it here and watch the video.

Interested in non-standard surfaces? Check out this TEDTalk on crocheting a life size coral reef.

Perseids Meteor Shower Peak soon - pretty skies

12-13 - Perseids Meteor Shower Peak - These meteors are leftovers from Swift-Tuttle comet and are a favorite among many skywatchers.
We missed the big show but the Super Moon would have made it tricky to see anyway. 

The shower can be visible from July 17th through August 24th, and will peak overnight on August 12th at 60 sightings per hour. Unfortunately, the light from the moon will wash out many of the meteors, though the brightest should still be visible.

You still have a chance to see this. Look up and enjoy.

You can also watch it online using slooh.com 
Check out membership to control their satellites to look into the universe. Cool!
http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/special-highlight-the-perseids-sensation

Also NASA has recorded some of it (of course):
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/51306509

Welcome Back and BIG NEWS

The Fields Prize has been awarded to a woman for the first time.

"Iranian-born mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani on Wednesday became the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics' equivalent to the Nobel Prize." Please read more in the CBC online here. 

You can also read more in The Guardian - a nice interview piece and The Stanford University press release, where Maryam Mirzakhani is a Professor of Mathematics. 

Thanks to Ajarn Lana for sharing this with the Mathematics department.

We are all working with Stanford University this year to develop our Mathematics and a growth mindset and you can puzzle over the famous puzzle that ignited her mathematical curiosity.

Add all of the numbers from 1 to 100 with a system that isn't 1+2+3+4 <-- there is a shortcut (:

LIVE SHARING - LIGHTNING STRIKES

COOL! GET IN
ENJOY

HERE

MYP3 Mathematicians Helping Others Understand Curves

Before I introduce three fabulous websites, I'd like to say that ALL of the MYP3 mathematicians have produced wonderful work demonstrating their understanding of curves and their transformations. Mathsland is proud to call them all citizens.

In our unit we were focusing on linear functions y=mx+p, and dipping into some quadratics but some decided they would like to go further and investigate other curves.

We had linear, quadratic, square root, Archimedes Spiral, sinusoidal and exponential curves. It was busy in Mathsland because everyone had different questions and a different adventure.

Three students, Annalis, Chanya and Eugene (alphabetical order chosen there), created websites using skills taught to them by the much beloved and missed Ajarn Marcus. By creating websites they are providing a service to other learners in the world of mathematics that want to know about sinusoidal waves and exponential functions.

Students used the desmos.com/calculator and its groovy sliders to play around with parameters to spot patterns.
check out some sliders here

Now for the websites:

Annalis' Exponentials are Cool

Eugene's Vas Are Sinusoidal Waves

Chanya's Parabolas

The Weather and its Patterns can be COOL

Below is an animated gif of winds around the Earth.
Check out the key below for deeper understanding of what you are looking at.

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/reanalysis

A 3-D animated image of Reanalysis-2 data for the first ten days of July 1979, in six-hourly intervals. This animation shows a constant 100mph wind speed surface in red. (Note the stronger, more widespread, polar jet stream in the southern hemisphere--this is July, during the southern winter.) A cyan-colored, constant temperature sheet of zero degrees Celsius ripples across the globe, showing the freezing level. Near-surface wind flow is denoted by white flowlines. This image was generated with plots from Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) combined with ImageMagick.

Mean Sea Surface Temperatures

Source: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-datasets/sea-surface-temperatures-sst-and-winds

A plot of global, monthly mean wind speeds and directions for September 1990. These data are from the Blended Sea Winds dataset, available through NOMADS. This image was produced with NASA’s Panoply visualization tool.

Here is a cool gif relating to what we are investigating in science and mathematics in MYP2
source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/High_School_Earth_Science/Climate_and_Its_Causes

Solar Power, Hexagons and a Moose

There has been a video of a moose lighting up a road as it crosses doing the rounds of social media recently. Today I clicked on it  and I was very impressed.  Two plucky people have invented amazing technology - solar panels that can be used as roads, pathways, outdoor areas shaped like hexagons.

If you are in MYP2 or you're a bee you know that the hexagon is part of making this technology strong.

It has won awards - check it out at indiegogo.com and in the video of one of their fans below.
Why isn't their government getting behind something like this? Great question.

I got behind it.

Pi - in it is everything π

Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicist

Q: Since pi is infinite, do its digits contain all finite sequences of numbers?

Posted on November 8, 2009 by The Mathematician

Mathematician: As it turns out, mathematicians do not yet know whether the digits of pi contains every single finite sequence of numbers. That being said, many mathematicians suspect that this is the case, which would imply not only that the digits of pi contain any number that you can think of, but also that they contains a binary representation of britney spears’ DNA.... read more in the site. Click the Question, the link 

Fascinating stuff!

How to see when you forget your glasses

or how we see things... from Minute Physics.

The Depth of the Problem of MH370

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/the-depth-of-the-problem/931/

Click on the link, this article has a wonderful infographic about just how difficult it is to try and find the black box (Australian invention) of MH370.

They say time is running out, but what about how long it took them to find the Titanic or the Air France aeroplane? They will keep on looking, but will they find this one?

Which governments do you think should continue to look for the wreckage of MH370 and why?

Units of Measurement:

feet and metres 

from google.com

PSI - pounds per square inch
Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pounds_per_square_inch

pings
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box8.htm
How Stuff Works is a great site.

For Tenzin and others who love the oceans and seas

From I Love Charts, yes that is a site that I do enjoy

Mathematical Dance Moves - What's yours?

On the windows of Mathsland are some formulas (formulae) to dance moves - check them out. What's your signature move? How would you graph it?

In MYP3 and MYP5 we have looked at graphing and patterns (different ones). Learning their signature moves on the axes can help us to understand how to graph them but also what they are trying to tell us about the pattern they represent.

Here's my  "squared triple circle cubed undefined gradient dance"



Play around with the formulas in the Desmos Calculator and check out some of the graphs other people have made like the minion...

We Are Happy - AS A TOKEN OF GRATITUDE TO PHARRELL WILLIAMS

This came across my social media world today:

"AS A TOKEN OF GRATITUDE TO PHARRELL WILLIAMS, WE ARE FROM L.A. - CLÉMENT DUROU & PIERRE DUPAQUIER, FOR THEIR WORLDWIDE CONTAGIOUS HAPPINESS..."

We Are Happy Map of Videos - a map is a graph - enjoy!

Here's the one we looked at

MYP2 Coders and Artists and Scientists

MYP2 have joined the world in the Hour of Code and Beyond the Hour of Code.

No one has to wait for MYP2 to learn to code, it's all online and it's free. Don't wait.

In a week we will begin our Summative task - Rube Goldberg Machines.

To be honest I had two other ideas for the summative task but then I was fortunate enough to see what they were creating in Visual Art...

Rube Goldberg machines. Too cool. Their imaginations can go wild in Visual Arts and now we can bring them to life using animation and Scratch programming.

We will work in teams and then piece the machines together; working like a machine in groups.

The mathematics needed covers a great deal:
coordinates; Cartesian plane; translations; reflections; rotations; negative and positive numbers; angles, properties of shapes; formulas, using variables and functions; logic statements; scaling and percentages and more and more...


and this site is pretty cool - so nice what you can do with a lot of free time.

This is HUGE!

Sorry about the lack of posts, I'm planning to make up for it.

And if you find something cool - a video or graphic or story that's mathematical, share it with me and I'll post it (referencing you of course).

It's about our universe, seconds after it began.

It's about theories and persistence

It's about patience and taking the time, a long time...

CHECK IT OUT HERE WOWOWOW

I love science and numbers

Pixels and the Scale of our Solar System

Check out this very cool If the Moon were the Size of a Pixel site, by Josh Worth.

It is very good at communicating the scale of the sun and the distance between planets.

CHECK IT OUT HERE 

Coordinate Practice - Learning from Mistakes

Ever struggled with plotting co-ordinates?  (x, y) 

On printed maps they use LETTERS with numbers help people locate things. 

What can you find in F6?

Click on this link to see the entire map from Thai Airways.

In maths, science, Google maps [what is found at location (8.0502489, 98.3523413)] and other subjects that use graphs like humanities, you can't use the same system of letters and numbers. There are always two numbers and you must remember the order. That's the reason coordinates are also called ordered pairs, because the order is important.  (3, 7) is not the same position as (7, 3).

There's "through the door and up the stairs" to help or play these two games and learn by making mistakes. 

Try Billy the Bug and the Whack a Mole game

Billy only has positive numbers.

MYP2 Coders Online

Hi there - in MYP2 we have started to write our own programs. Some are even investigating the code of other programs online too.

This is where we will publish our code

Happy Valentine's Day

Good Morning!

Send your love and kindness with some mathematics. So sweet.

Check out some Math-O-Grams here...

mathograms at desmos

Here Come the MYP2 Coders!

Anda is first off the blocks with his two codes

A cool Spiral and something quite Disco (if you have epilepsy, Disco is not recommended because there is a lot of flashing).

Click on the links to see the fun.

Disco programming was developed initially by Tera, then Nom and then Anda took it on too. Excellent collaboration.

Anda's Spiral at code.org http://learn.code.org/sh/11921722

Do you want to learn to code - check out the  Hour of Code for lots of tutorials.

Stay tuned - next week all of MYP2s first programs will be live on the blog.

CODING - You should learn to do it.

MYP2 has begun their new unit on coding - computer programming.

The giants of programming and computing must have known that we were going to be doing this unit because they have put together an AWESOME site

code.org/

Below is the video we watched for you to enjoy. In this video you will see some of our high profile teachers.

As well as coding we will be enjoying some 'analogue' activities so that our MYP2s get to see how computers do all that magic inside.

We are starting small, just like Bill Gates did, and building from there.

The site has a wide range of tutorials from phone apps to computer science to first year college courses in programming. Once the MYP2s do the Beyond One Hour Computer Science course, they can take their independent learning in any direction they like.

Coding is a very cool area of mathematics.

MYP2 - please check your Managebac messages to sign up to our course.

If anyone else wants to join, please check out the amazing site and it's one hour introductions into many aspects of coding at code.org/learn

Synchronisation or Synchronization depending on your point of view, it's all pretty cool

Lots of people are posting a video about a murmuration of starlings on social networks. I came across this video and others many years ago and I wish to see it at a large scale one day.

For more collective noun names for animals that are as cool as a murmuration of starlings and a murder of crows check this out. It's about naming a group of animals, so technically they are mathematical terms. You can't be a called a group without counting to check if there are more than one of something present.

What's your favourite?
Do you do the same thing in your mother tongue?



On the TEDtalk page of our mathematics blog is a video about synchronisation in every day occurrences. I think you will enjoy it.  Steven Stogatz and his talk on "How things in nature tend to sync up" should be at the top of the blog page.