Scientists need you to count cute baby penguins via the Washington Post

During my morning commute I read about a great project involving penguins, counting, science, ecology and collaboration. That's a lot of boxes ticked.

You can provide some community service by counting penguins in images supplied by scientists.

I was fortunate enough to visit Antarctica in 2013 and loved the penguins. I'll be counting penguins for science and our world. I hope you do too.

You can read the Washington Post article via this link.
You can check out the project via this link.

Please enjoy two of my favourite penguin photos (I have hundreds)!

Antarctica Wildlife

Not all penguin tummies are white. This one is fine, just a messy eater. That's his lunch you can see. 

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

Mathematicians, the unsung heroes of research from The Age, in Melbourne

Hello to all reading this blog. I try to read my local paper from Melbourne as often as I can and the other day there was an interesting article about the amazing research that mathematicians do.

They aren't racing through ten problems to check the answers, they are problem solvers working on long tasks checking and reflecting on their work as they go.

Please enjoy this article by Andi Horvath about

Mathematicians, the unsung heroes of research

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.

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.