Friday, February 22, 2013

Math Links for Week Ending Feb 22, 2013

Too bad I didn't catch this one for last weeks post but better late than never. This is a TED-ED talk about the mathematics of online dating. Specifically how the site OKCupid calculates its matching algorithm. Some really simple math but ingenious. Could easily be used to talk about statistics and the geometric mean or just the nature of what an algorithm is and why computers are so good at calculating them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9PiPlRuy6E
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U

Here is a great data set about taxi cab fairs in Toronto. Totally linear data that could be adapted to any grade 9 or 10 applied or academic class. 
Curriculum Tags: MFM1P, MPM1D, MFM2P, MPM2D
Chris Hadfield talks about some applications of using math on the ISS. If you have seen any of Chris' videos you know that he has been a great ambassador for the space program (just check out is AMA - ask me anything - on Reddit). Anyway in this brief video he refers to Pythagorean theorem and trig
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MFM1P, MPM1D, MFM2P, MPM2D
 

One of the latest from Numberphile is a great heads up for Pi day. This time about how precise do you need to know Pi to calculate the circumference of the universe. More specifically, how many decimals are needed for most practical applications.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8



Nice images of what 200 calories look like for different types of food. Its a different sort of visualization than a regular graph. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one.
Curriculum Tags: Grade7, Grade8, MBF3C, MDM4U


Friday, February 15, 2013

Math Links for Week Ending Feb 15th, 2013

On this day after Valentine's day, what better way to celebrate than calculating how likely it would be to find love (and life on other planets). Could be used for percents or probability
Curriculum Tags: Grade 7, Grade 8, MDM4U, MCF3M
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/12/the-math-of-love/

I think that applications like this "Robot" kit is a great way to apply ideas in math classrooms. However I disagree with one of the things the guy says in the video. That "kids these days don't want to learn abstract math". I don't think most kids ever want to learn abstract math. However it is important to try to learn abstract content. Not for the sake of the content but for the sake of the brain exercise needed to master that content. Regardless, this is pretty cool.
http://mashable.com/2013/02/08/robots-drones-classroom/
Curriculum Tags: All



One of the things you can do if you have a YouTube account (and if you have a Gmail account, by default, you have one), is to create playlists of videos. Here a teacher has created two play lists. One to fit in to the Advanced Functions course and one for the grade 11 University course. And what she has done is linked the videos to the textbooks she is using by labeling the videos by textbook section. So the Advanced functions is linked to the McGraw Hill Textbook and the Grade 11 U videos are linked to the Nelson book.
MCR3U: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL267D675176AFDA06
MHF4U: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB593B541513EA001
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MHF4U

Here is a nice simple introduction to inverse functions. Worksheet included
http://drawingonmath.blogspot.ca/2013/02/inverse-functions.html
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U

Here is a nice little activity about creating quadrilaterals based on being given one side.
http://donsteward.blogspot.ca/2013/01/complete-quadrilateral.html
Curriculum Tags: Grade 7






Here are three versions of Dan Meyer's Stacking Cups task. Its a great task for linear relationships and could be used for grade 9&10 applied & academic depending on whether you just use the idea of stacking a single cup or find two different types of cups and ask when will they have the same height.
Dan Meyer: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=692
Andrew Stadel: http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca/2013/01/styrofoam-cups.html
Fawn Nguyen: http://fawnnguyen.com/2013/02/05/20130204.aspx
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P



Although this teacher is talking about doing this for grade 8 curriculum, here in Ontario that fits the grade 10 academic curriculum. Teaching about perpendicular lines with geoboards but it could be done just as well with graph paper.
http://untilnextstop.blogspot.ca/2013/01/perpendicular-slopes-and-geoboards.html
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D

Even the cleaning person could be doing math
https://twitter.com/scottywrotem/status/199069633960087553/photo/1
Curriculum Tags: Grade 7, Grade 8, MFM1P, MPM1D

Yup we got yer bad math
http://apple.copydesk.org/2013/02/07/heres-one-for-the-pie-chart-hall-of-fame/
Curriculum Tags: Grade 7

Friday, February 8, 2013

Math links for the Week Ending Feb 8th, 2013


The first of two really good 3Acts Tasks from Dan Meyer. The first one is perfect for intersection of lines. Click here for the first act video. Click on this link for the full task
http://threeacts.mrmeyer.com/ditchdiggers/
Curriculum Tags:MFM2P, MPM2D


In the 2nd 3Acts Task, Dan uses bubble wrap to generated quadratic data. Below is the first video. Click here to see the entire task.
http://threeacts.mrmeyer.com/bubblewrap/
Curriculum Tags:MFM2P, MPM2D


Act 1 — Bubble Wrap from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

This site gives a visual view of the real time traffic on Twitter. A really nice non standard representation of data
Curriculum Tags: Grade7, Grade8, MDM4U

We don't know what the largest prime number is but recently we discovered a new largest known prime. It has over 17 million digitshttp://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/06/largest-prime-number-yet-discovered/
Curriculum Tags: Grade 7, Grade 8

Indexed has always been a quirky site. With its venn diagrams and emotional graphs. Here's one that could be related to quadratic relations.
http://thisisindexed.com/2013/02/how-to-say-everything-without-a-word/
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P

Friday, February 1, 2013

Math links for Week Ending Feb 1st, 2013

How do you show a graph when you are on the radio? You convert it to music and have an opera singer sing it of course. I have just been getting caught up on some of my older podcasts and heard this great piece by Planet Money. Rather than just describe the graph seen on the right, they converted it to music and had it sung. Perfect for showing that data can be represented in many ways.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/27/135737940/the-case-shiller-index-sung-as-opera
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MDM4U, MAP4C

Is the Body Mass Index (BMI) really that useful if it says people like Brad Pitt are considered overweight? In fact, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is actually obese according to the BMI. Here's another adjusted measure. This could be used for teaching order of operations in Gr 7 or Gr8. Just sayin
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21229387
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8




New activities from Texas Instruments. The first set has Linear functions, Analytic Geometry, Polynomials, Rational Functions & Normal Distributions
http://link.ti-enews.com/YesConnect/HtmlMessagePreview?a=pC3-l-skG1wkDYGjGXnVfu
The second set has Linear Functions, Quadrilaterals, Logarithmic Functions and Sampling Distributions
http://link.ti-enews.com/YesConnect/HtmlMessagePreview?a=pi0i0eskG1wkDYGjH1DDB-
Curriculum Tags: MFM1P, MPM1D, MFM2P, MPM2D, MHF4U, MDM4U



Want to develop the value of Pi using Archimedes Principle of Exhaustion? Who doesn't? You can do it here at the Nova site with a handy dandy interactive applet. While you are there check out their other applets for math and science as well as full episodes of Nova.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/approximating-pi.html
Curriculum Tags: Gr8



Numberphile just released a video post compiling the results from their quest to find YouTube's favourite number. Here is the blog post that gives the detailed results of the data as well as the summary video and original videos. Great for any Data Management class
http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/popular-numbers.html
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MAP4C, MDM4U




In the Numberphile post below you may have noticed that there are some limit expressions. These were produced by an online LaTeX equation editor that lets you create equations and then paste HTML code into your web pages (or images into your documents). A useful thing if you have ever needed to put math in a webpage
http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php
Curriculum Tags: All

A great video by Numberphile on the problems with dividing by zero and the idea of 00. A nice discussion of and (and others).
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U



Here is a nice image to talk about both bad math and rates
http://i.imgur.com/zH6jQlp.jpg
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P









And another in the Watermelon Series:
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/0c/b9/05/0cb9056c7faaa6321c5a94dde55f5aa1.jpg
Curriculum Tags:All