Math Links for Week Ending January 9th, 2015

We have been adding to our Engaging Math blog. This time it's one of the first activities we ever made for grade 9 applied. We started by modelling the board after Candyland and then generated questions dealing with determining angles. Kids really seem to enjoy doing math while playing this game. It is meant as a review of skills and works really well.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P
http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/2015/01/geometry-board-game.html

The Dot Physics blog continues to milk the latest Star Wars trailer for physics data. And here is more analysis on figuring out the speed of things using tools that would fit into Advanced Functions. Have fun.
Curriculum Tags:MHF4U
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/fast-speeder-star-wars-vii/

Another one from our Engaging Math blog was one that I actually had sitting around for years but then was reminded of it last week when I saw this post from Mike's Math Page. It wasn't specifically about volume of a pyramid but that is where it started.  So I tweaked mine a bit and made it more formal. You can download all the templates here (or just watch the videos).
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P
http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/2015/01/volume-of-pyramid.html

I have always liked the ambiguous case in Trig. And I really like the way that Mary from the M³ blog handles it. Letting students discover something is up. She pairs them up to draw triangles given information and then wait and see if some get the two related triangles. Take a look
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCT4C
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-ambiguous-case.html

Nice video from Veritasium about the psychology of expected value. It would be a nice little experiment to do with students to give them an idea of what it means. I like the part were he talks about the difference of doing the experiment one time versus doing it one hundred times.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBX-KulgJ1o

It is old but who can resist a good Calculus parody video.
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9dpTTpjymE

I made a couple of videos on how to construct a circle. In grade 8, students are supposed to construct in three ways: 1) by centre and radius, 2) by centre and point and 3) by three points. The first two are relatively easy but the third one comes from the property that the perpendicular bisectors of any two chords of a circle will intersect at the centre. One of the videos is a manual construction and the other is via GSP. 

Curriculum Tags: Gr8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lTbtsL7Pxc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0O_dLme_yE

Some data to start the new year. Data about new year's resolutions that is. Sure there is a nice bar graph about the most common new year's resolutions but the one I like is the one that uses Google Trends to show how the words "diet" and "gym" are cycled throughout the year. This is a pretty cool tool where you can search the frequency of any search term or phrase you can think of.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-fast-youll-abandon-your-new-years-resolutions/

It's always good to find data that kids might be interested in. Why not help them win Wheel of Fortune then.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/05/how-to-win-wheel-of-fortune/

My favourite Equation.
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MCF3M, MBF3C, MCR3U
http://img.ifcdn.com/images/60dca67a912bbaa9bd2fbb705c4986c8e3572f68_1.jpg