Math Links for Week Ending Jan. 10th, 2014

The Story Collider is a podcast that features real stories that deal with science. That is real people talking about their experiences with and around science related ideas. Occasionally there is a story that relates to math too. This one is a story from the perspective of a woman who, as a student, wrote math contests and was a "mathlete". Its kind of like The Karate Kid or Rocky but with math contests. Its kind of funny too (though there is some explicit language). Listen here:
Curriculum Tags: All
http://storycollider.org/podcast/2012-08-26

Sometimes when we teach calculus we forget that even these students (who should be the best of the best) need some help organizing their thoughts. This nice graphic organizer on the first and second derivative test is just the thing to facilitate that.
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
http://mathteachermambo.blogspot.ca/2014/01/calculus-graphical-organizer.html





Yummy Math has an activity that is quite topical right now. The length of the day. We know that the length of daylight is a sinusoidal function and they have a ready made activity with some ready made data. But if you don't want to use their data you can get your own from this site and even get a dynamic function mapper from this applet (though I can't figure out what the point of the Show Yearly Average option is for).
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MHF4U
http://www.yummymath.com/2014/ah-the-days-are-getting-longer/

On Mike's Math Page, Mike writes about math with his kids. He does this often with videos that show that elementary students (his two sons) can understand complex mathematics. In this case it is infinite series by way of tearing paper. I really like this because it really does show that these concepts are not as complex as they may seem when you couple them with the right manipulative.
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U
http://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/james-tantons-infinite-series-video-and-paper-tearing/

Someone asked me to look for a problem that grade 3-8 students could work on. I asked twitter and here are a couple of the examples that I got. I think that lot's of logic problems could be used for these students. Next week I will talk about some of the other resources that were suggested.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8

Thanks to @DaveLanovaz for this one
https://twitter.com/DanielBeylerian/status/339419663421284352/photo/1

Thanks to @ecokrisb for this one
https://twitter.com/ecokrisb/status/420017997621645312/photo/1