Sunday, 14 December 2014

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. 


Friday, 21 November 2014

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 (:

Wednesday, 12 November 2014

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

Thursday, 30 October 2014

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
"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/>

Friday, 17 October 2014

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

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

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!

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>



Monday, 13 October 2014

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/>