Math Links for Week ending Jan 30th, 2015

Last year Mary at the Making Math Meaningful blog gave us a day by day glimpse of how she spiralled through the curriculum in her grade 10 applied class. This year she starts of giving her starter for her entire semester of classes. All 5 days for each of the 18 weeks. Check out the download on her site. Thanks Mary
Curriculum Tags: MFM2P
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/01/warm-ups.html

Andrew Stadel has maintained the Estimation 180 site to entertain a great discussion on what is essentially the idea of being numerate. Now he expands to a Twitter feed: @Estimation180. So a tweet a day to satisfy his daily estimation fix. Thanks to Mary Bourrassa for this one.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MAT1L, MPM1D, MFM1P, MAT2L, MPM2D, MFM2P, MEL3E, MEL4E
http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca/2015/01/estimation180-tweets.html

#estimation180 How much can those things hold? How much do they weigh? How long do they last? How long to produce? pic.twitter.com/TMqguMIpxE
— Estimation 180 (@Estimation180) January 29, 2015

It turns out there are some strategies for doing well at Monopoly. All it takes is some work with probabilities. Take a look here
Curriculum Tags: MBF3C, MDM4U
http://www.businessinsider.com/math-monopoly-statistics-2013-6







I really like these visualizations of the effectiveness of various medications. They really connect the idea of how visualizations can make a concept much more clear. For example, many people will tell you that someone who is at risk of a heart attack should take aspirin. But the data shows that if two thousand people did this, only one would avoid having a heart attack. Take a look for the dynamic versions on the site below.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/upshot/can-this-treatment-help-me-theres-a-statistic-for-that.html

In measurement, precision and accuracy are often use synonymously but they are different. It is probably worth talking about this when doing anything to do with measurement. One of the more interesting bits is how some electronic conversion devices deal with ounces and grams.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://astrolabesandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/precision-accuracy-medieval-astronomy.html

It turns out that we have been giving math problems with contrived contexts since at least the 12th century:

The Liber mahameleth, which has just been translated into English, was one of the largest books on mathematics written in the Middle Ages.

And some of the problems might look familiar: 

A messenger is sent to a town and advances daily by twenty miles. In how many days will another messenger, sent five days later and advancing daily by thirty miles, overtake him?

A good way to bring your students back to dark ages :-)
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P

 I have added a couple more Geometer's Sketchpad files to my Engaging Math blog. The first is a practice file for doing the Pythagorean Theorem. This will randomly generate right triangles with either the hypotenuse or a leg missing (you decide). You can then check the solution and try another. Although PT is in the grade 8 curriculum, this file is probably not appropriate for it since in grade 8 the focus is mainly about the geometric representation.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P
http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/2015/01/geometers-sketchpad-practice.html

The second one is for practicing determining the midpoint of a line segment. The first page lets you create your own problem then check the answer and the second will generate a random set of points for you to find the midpoint. Both of these files are intended for students to use directly and work really well on the free Sketchpad Explorer app on the iPad
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D
http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/2015/01/geometers-sketchpad-practice-midpoint.html

So it turns out the best visual effects laden movies require a lot of math to pull off. And those mathematicians who help? Well, they get Oscars.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/21/oscars-vancouver_n_6519254.html

Visualizing data is always a good thing for humans. Here is a video that ties to visualize the different ways we can look at 200 calories by showing how much of different types of food equal that. It think it might have been based on this graphic that has been circulating around the web for some time.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMGUmcveQeg

I am a sucker for these videos as I think they give a real world application for vector addition. Plus the fact that this is just at one airport. That is some crazy cross winds. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one.
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P9OAng32F0

Some geometric fun from George Hart in honour of SuperBowl Sunday.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujCgEnywAG0

And why not a bit more kinetic art that has mathematical precision.

Curriculum Tags: All

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/01/kinetic-sculptures-john-edmark/

On a recent Mythbusters they did a whole show on Raiders of the Lost Arc. On one of the segments, they were simulating the part of the movie where Indie jumps over the chasm and they used quadratic modelling pretty explicitly to determine the distance. Too bad this is only an image of what was on my TV screen but hopefully you get the idea
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P, MBF3C, MCF3M, MCR3U
https://twitter.com/davidpetro314/status/559891388532527104/photo/1

This is a cool exercise in proportional reasoning. In this infographic they take the size of the country and change it based on the population of the people in that country. It's also good for data management discussions about the validity or comparison of big numbers. Boooo, Canada almost disappears. Make sure you look at the original image in large format to get the whole picture
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MDM4U
http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/01/28/381971608/india-grows-russia-shrinks-mapping-countries-by-population