Math Links for Week Ending May 9th, 2014

Today I did an Ignite presentation at the OAME 2014 conference. There were 10 of us (Ruth Beatty, Cathy Bruce, George Couros, George Hart, Ron Lancaster, Amy Lin, Dan Meyer, Marian Small, Chris Suurtamm. and me) and we all get 5 minutes (20 slides at 15 seconds each) to talk about any topic we want. I chose to speak on recreational reading for math teachers. That is, books you could read to help bring interesting and relevant ideas into your math classes. I basically spoke for 5 minutes straight and apparently there will be video available soon but here is the slide deck:
Curriculum Tags: All
http://bit.ly/oame2014ignitepetro

Last week I talked about Alex Belos's books about numbers and this week he's on RadioLab doing the same thing. Such a well produced show. Listen here.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.radiolab.org/story/love-numbers/

Do you like puzzles and logic. Then you probably like recreational math. This is the first issue of Recreational Math Magazine. Some classic problems and maybe some you have never seen.

Curriculum Tags: All
http://rmm.ludus-opuscula.org/


New out from the Ministry in the Paying Attention to mathematics series is Paying Attention to Spatial Reasoning. I love these documents because they do a good job of weaving the topics through out the entire curriculum from k-12. I was in a session about this document a few weeks ago and they used some of the Nrich series. I like these about whether the nets will actually fold into a shape. And these paper folding activities are actually pretty cool in giving you a sense of what is meant by spatial reasoning.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://edugains.ca/newsite/math/payingattentiontomath.html

A few weeks ago I mentioned the new-ish game 2048. I like how the Making Math Meaningful blog has taken that game and extended it by collecting data on the solutions. That is, the game works on the principal of doubling (they go through the premiss) and then collected data on how long it took them to get to the various levels (2, 4, 8, 16, .......). And not surprising (to math teachers I hope) the data has an exponential shape. Perfect if you are trying to match real life to exponential functions.
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MHF4U, MAP4C
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2014/04/2048.html

I like these two different activities from Fawn Nguyen. The first concerns area unit conversions. Most humans don't have a really good handle on doing this and Fawn uses a role of toilet paper to make this a little more palatable for the students. The other activity is a great linear relations context. Figuring out how much it would cost to take a Taxi given the following rule (see image). Take a look at the blog post for more info.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MFM1P, MPM1D
http://fawnnguyen.com/2014/04/22/tp-and-taxi-rate.aspx

New from Numberphile is a mathematical fable. This one is about the geometric representation of the Pythagorean theorem (with some similar figures included). You can also check out my GSP sketch on the same thing here.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItiFO5y36kw

I am always looking for interesting data sets displayed in interesting ways. This one looks at how verbose various rap artists are by looking up how many different words they use in the first 35,000 lyrics that they released. Then it displays it in a dynamic dot plot (go to the website for that). It even throws in where Shakespeare would be if he was a rapper.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://rappers.mdaniels.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/