Math Links for Week Ending June 13th, 2014

Speed dating and Row games are two really nice activities to promote kids doing questions and then self checking whether they are correct or not. I first learned about these from @k8nowak on her Function of Time blog a few years ago. I was recently reminded of them when @thescamdog tweeted that they have a little video introduction to these on their provincial math site in Alberta. Speed dating has students become experts in the solution for one question each. They are then paired sitting across from each other and switch question. Once that question is solved then they shift one position and switch with another student. Row games has students paired with a worksheet where there are two columns of questions and each student does the question in one column. The beauty of the worksheet is that the answer for each question in any particular row is the same so that if the students get different answers they know that one or both of them has made a mistake. Thus it's self checking.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.aac.ab.ca/projects-grants/high-school-mathematics/#FormativeAssessmentRowGamesandSpeedDatingvideo-6

How about some data on the lyrics that boy bands of the 90's used the most. Yep, there's data on that. Hey, data is data. This could easily be used for central tendancy, bar graphs, or even box plots.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/90s-boy-band-lyrics-theyre-all-about-you/

I like collecting real data in classes, and so I was thrilled with a reason to do so. That is, the mystery of why there are different weights of regular M&Ms vs Peanut Butter M&Ms per bag. The actual reason is a bit of a mystery and you can listen about that mystery with the Planet Money podcast here . But collecting data about how many M&Ms are in each pack (or how much each pack weighs in reality) is a good way to talk about measures of central tendency, dot plots, and standard deviation.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/06/05/319084976/why-a-pack-of-peanut-butter-m-ms-weighs-a-tiny-bit-less-than-a-regular-pack

Though this is a couple of years old, I just came across it today. Math Goes to the Movies is a book that connects scenes in movies to teaching specific math concepts. Having done presentations on this sort of thing at OAME, I am interested to see what they have found that I haven't
Curriculum Tags:All
https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/math-goes-movies

Math anxiety is real. We have all seen kids who suffer from it. Here are some ways to combat this problem.

Curriculum Tags: All

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-fight-your-kids-math-anxiety/372572/

Mixing dance and math to entice girls in an after school program.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/04/18/after-school-program-uses-dance-nurture-girls-interest-math/JmszMn1zOR7DPcRiozShpN/story.html

One of Keith Devlin's more recent books was Leonardo & Steve about, you guessed it, Fibonacci and Jobs. It comes in ebook only form but if you want to get the gyst of what's in the book you might look at this two part talk on the same subject.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://vimeo.com/93390473
http://vimeo.com/93532834

I like this math "takedown" of this motivational poster. It leads to a nice problem about comparing the volume of cylinders, spheres and cubes. Could be used in grade 9 math measurement or in grade 8 if you leave out the sphere.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P, Gr8
https://twitter.com/dandersod/status/477024981042626560

Might as well have a graph about the World Cup. This is coming from the 538 blog where they predict the winner of the soccer tournament. And as they point out, you don't need a computer model to predict that Brazil is the heavy favourite (even after their controversial win over Croatia). Either way they go through the reasoning behind their prediciton
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-brazils-world-cup-to-lose/

538 keeps hitting with the data that has so much bearing on world events. Which is the blingiest NBA playoff matchup? That is which pair of teams has the most rings.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/its-the-second-blingiest-finals-matchup-in-modern-nba-history/

Math Links for Week Ending Jan 25th, 2013

Math in the News is a website that puts out a slideshow on a semi regular basis. The slideshows indicate instances where math shows up in the news and includes ideas of where to incorporate them in math curriculum. The most recent one is from November of 2012 and of course includes info about the election. Currently there are 67 of these slideshows so there is quite a back catalog to get caught up with
http://www.slideshare.net/Media4Math/
Curriculum Tags: All

I know that I have already mentioned the Wild About Math blog but they have just uploaded another Inspired by Math interview. This time with Keith Devlin (The Math Guy -among other things). In this almost 2hour interview Keith talks extensively about teaching his MOOC (massively open online course) Introduction to Mathematical Thinking to over 64,000 students. I have blogged a bit about the concept here but this was really interesting to hear some of the logistical aspects. For example, he talked bit about the validity and method for students grading each other.
He also said a couple of things that really resonated with me. I will paraphrase here "Learning math is like learning to ride a bike. You can't learn by just having it explained to you. You have to try it and fail at it and try it and fail at it and then finally you will learn to ride a bike and you will never forget how to do it again" and "In high school I aced my calculus courses but didn't understand calculus until I was a graduate student TAing a calculus course"
Look for his new Math gaming app which should be coming out in about 3 weeks.
http://wildaboutmath.com/2013/01/22/keith-devlin-%E2%80%93-inspired-by-math-17/
Curriculum Tags: All

Here is a great site to get some sinusoidal (and maybe some linear) data for analysis. In fact, I got the sunrise sunset data for Windsor, massaged it into a spreadsheet and then created a Fathom file for you here to use. Have fun. Sundata.csv, Sundata.ftm
http://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MHF4U




With the Superbowl coming up, I thought I would share a slideshow I made for the 2008 Superbowl on all the different ways the money is spent on that one weekend.

Are you ready for some fooseball2008 from d2thep

Curriculum Tags: MDM4U


I am not completely sure how this could be used in a math class but I was fascinated by the connection of math and economics to show that LeBron James is actually severely underpaid at $17M per year. I am pretty sure you could tie this into statistics. Listen to NPR's Planet Money story here:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/01/25/170176590/at-17-5-million-a-year-lebron-james-is-underpaid
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U

Dan Meyer did a nice montage of disparaging marks against math in the movies. One of the neat things about this clip was the website Subzin. On that site you can enter any words or phrases and it will search out where and when that appeared in their movie database.
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=16222
Curriculum Tags: All

Another nice video from The Art of the Problem. This time on using tree diagrams with conditional probability.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxm4Xxvzohk

Curriculum Tags: MDM4U