Leading Architects Design Cool Doll Houses

Twenty famous architects designed doll houses help KIDS, a charity for children with physical and mental disabilities.

This post was inspired by Bpok, Kim and Dreem in MYP4. They are using their google time to develop their Sketchup skills and there is a budding architect amongst them.

Zombies and Relationships - will they last?

In MYP5 we are looking at the mathematical modelling of a Zombie Apocalypse and my sister, Michelle Griffin, posted this in facebook today

Charting 20 Years of Pop-Culture Witches, Zombies, and Vampires from Vulture (a very good read indeed)




And she also posted this very cool statistical study on relationships and predicting their outcomes (stay together or ...).

"It’s not in the stars after all. Instead, it seems, the shape of a person’s social network is a powerful signal that can identify one’s spouse or romantic partner — and even if a relationship is likely to break up"

Here is the fascinating article about it from the New York Times

Cameron Marlow/FacebookA graphical representation of one person’s network neighborhood on Facebook.

The Beauty Of Mathematics - A Video

Humans Will Be Outnumbered By Lego Minifigures

Today we feature some cool maths sent to us from Ajarn Jon.

There is so much mathematics in the world of humanities and here is a cool graph of humans and lego humans.

By 2019, Humans Will Be Outnumbered By Lego Minifigs - Gizmodo

From Gizmodo, where Ajarn Jon found this (it looks like it may have originated from XKCD):

Since their introduction in 1978, Lego's Minifigs have, um, reproduced at a rapid rate. In fact, the toymaker has been making the little fellas at such a pace that they'll outnumber humans by 2019.
As of 2006, there were 4 billion Minifigs in the world; projecting forward both human and Lego populations suggests that tiny plastic men will outnumber us by 2019. Imagine that: a world where there are more Minifigs than fellow homosapiens. That's our kind of world. [XKCD]

WOW - Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers art project

This is fantastic.

What a wonderful way to visualise the scale of things.

Please click on the link and enjoy.
Click once on each picture and watch as it either zooms in or out.

MathGifs

Here is a very cool site of Maths Gifs for your enjoyment:
mathgifs.blogspot.co.uk

Here is one of the Gifs - Do you see rotation or translation?

Is there a 4th Dimension

After an interesting chat with Dreem in class I thought I would post this great video from the excellent Minute Physics Youtube Channel.

From Triangular Worms to Strandbeesties

Check out these mathematical creatures that live on beaches. We started watching in MYP2 today, but I think students young and old (including teachers and parents) will be amazed.

Don't forget there are many subtitles you can choose from...

The Education of Girls

Mika and Tera Young are raising money to send a girl to school. Sending girls to school changes the world. As well as providing the one girl with an opportunity to learn and access possibilities that could have been out of her reach, she will impact other lives and those lives will impact even more lives.

Prickly Pear Lemonade by Bryan Davidson,
on Flickr licensed under CC by NC & A

Again and again when you look at the education of girls in the world it is one of the key indicators for development.

In MYP2 we are looking at patterns and how to write these mathematically, developing formulae to help make predictions.

If we know the cost of one pink lemonade, how many do we need to sell to make 10,000 Baht?

• What questions do you have?
• How can you set up the maths to help us reach our goal?
• If we don’t sell enough on day one, how many times do we need to run our pink lemonade stand to send a girl to school?

In MYP3 we are looking at the mathematics of chance. We have already asked ourselves how unlikely was it that we were actually born when we think about everything it took to make us. Ask an MYP to explain or me or Ajarn Hugo.

So what decides our future? What things decide our circumstances and opportunities that are out of control and quite random and what choices can we make to change these? Who can help?

In MYP4 we are busy designing a useful space (stay tuned) but they would be excellent people to ask about how to set up the pink lemonade stand to ensure that everyone who wants to support this can get their pink lemonade quickly to help increase sales.

In MYP5 we are looking at data and how they make patterns that we can mathematically model for predictions of all shapes and sizes.  Using www.gapminder.org we can see that the education level of girls and the percentage of girls educated creates patterns that you can’t ignore.

Help Mika and Tera:

• Buy pink lemonade
• Do the mathematics to help them reach their goals
• Use mathematics to help your understanding of why this is so important and how you are very lucky yourselves.
• Check out www.gapminder.org - mathematics can help to make the world a better place. 

Bubble Artist - it's a real job

"The sphere is nature's most efficient shape"

In MYP2 we are asking ourselves "What is nature's shape?". We stopped to look at the sphere from the BBC series called The Code.