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.

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

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.

MYP2 and the Giant Rubber Duck

Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman makes giant ducks.

Each one is unique and they have a message for the world.

What is that message?

The Arrival by Halanslicensed under CC by A NC SA 

MYP2 have been working on the mathematics of generalisation or algebra. They find patterns. They create formulas. They estimate. They justify. They compare methods. They discuss accuracy. They form hypothesis. They tackle long problems, not short one liners. MYP2 are mathematicians at work.

Now they have been asked to bring all of their skills together to work out if Phuket can produce enough rubber for one of these ducks. It is not a yes or no answer, we want details. 

How much rubber is produced right next to PIADS? 

How much rubber is needed?

What are those ducks all about?

Why spread the message with a rubber duck? 

We have more questions - check out the windows of the maths room. 

Fermi Problems - How Many Soi Dogs are there in Phuket?

A Fermi problem is an estimation problem named after the Enrico Fermi, a twentieth-century, Nobel Prize winning Physicist using very little information.

MYP5 have been working on estimations using sound reasoning and then calculating the absolute percentage error from the excellent site Estimation 180. Other classes have used this site too and it's a wonderful way for anyone (grown-ups too) to develop their number sense. 

It is now time for MYP5 to go a step further and ask a question where the answer is not readily available. Good reasoning will be important here. 

Below this video from ed.ted.com are some famous examples.

 

The circumference of the Earth – using time zones

1.     How many time zones do you pass through when you fly from New York to Los Angeles? 3

2.     How many miles is it, about, over that same distance? about 3000.

3.     How many miles per time zone, on average? about 1000

4.     How many time zones must there be around the world? 24 because there are 24 hours in a day

5.     How many miles around the world? 24 time zones x 1000 miles per time zone = 24000 miles

About 24000 miles around the world.

Fermi's Piano Tuner Problem 

1. At that time Chicago had a population of about 3 million people.
2. Reasonable assumption: average family size is four. Therefore the number of families in Chicago is around 750,000.
3. Reasonable assumption: one in five families owns a piano. Therefore the number of pianos in Chicago will be around 150,000.
4. Reasonable assumption: the average piano tuner serviced four pianos every day for five working day and had two weeks holiday.

We can calculate that in one year a tuner would service 1,000 pianos. 

There is an estimated 150 piano tuners in Chicago.

Example of Fermi Questions:
How many nails are in the Pirate Ship? 
What is the volume of air that I breathe in one day?
How many people in the world are taking photos with their phones in any given minute?
How many soi dogs are on the island of Phuket?