Math Links for Week Ending May 1st, 2015

This is not necessarily a math video but there is something about the Smarter Everyday video that I really love. The general gist is about neuroplasticity and that as we age we become more rigid in our thinking. And the analogy is riding a bike. In this case a bike where the steering is backwards. The cool thing is about how long it took him to re learn how to ride this type of bike compared to his son.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0

I like when I find activities that try to pull out student understanding. In this activity the topic of choice is trig ratios. That is, do kids understand the beyond just memorizing them. The other thing about this activity that is nice is that it also involves a lot of movement of kids from desk to desk as they change partners
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P
http://samjshah.com/2015/04/30/do-kids-really-understand-trigonometry-once-sinecosinetangent-are-introduced/

I love simple tweaks to make mundane things a bit more palatable. In this case, the mundane thing is factoring quadratics and the tweak is speed dating. I first heard of speed dating here but this is a really simple adaptation of it. Take a look for the downloads and instructions
Curriculum tags: MPM2D, MFM2P
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/04/mfm2p-day-49-more-factoring.html


And another activity pointed out by Mary at the Making Math Meaningful blog is a sorting activity from the Shell Centre dealing with quadratic polynomials. Expressions in words, algebraic, tabular and tile form ned to be matched up. Mary likes it so much she had two blog posts about it. Check them out here.
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/04/mfm2p-day-50-factoring-continued.html
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/04/mfm2p-day-51-shell-matching-activity.html

I think this would be a nice problem for grade 7&8 students to work on to contribute to Number Sense. Students can use a lot of tinkering but if they are going to watch the solution then you might have to bring some grade 9 and 10 skills in (like substituting equations into equations) but it is still a question that keeps kids tinkering
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9qU20VmvaU

So Canadians love poop. Well maybe not poop, but the poop emoji. That according to the company that created the emoji's in the first place, Swiftkey. They have the data and they have now shared it. So if you want some stuff that your kids might be interested in then look no further. Thanks to @sadone for this one
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/americans-love-skulls-brazilians-love-cats-swiftkey-emoji-meanings-report/