Math Links for Week Ending Sept. 25th, 2015

I'm not sure if this is a new offering but it's new to me. From Desmos is their tutorial site. All the tutorial videos and I have always loved their interactive tutorials (really, they are very good). Plus they have them sorted by grade group (elementary, middle school, high school and calculus). This is a great place for your students to start.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://learn.desmos.com/

In Canada we have eliminated the penny. Really, it wasn't that hard. All we had to do was develop some rounding rules so that if you paid in cash, you wouldn't need pennies to get your change. So that means now everything has to be rounded to the nearest nickel (only if you are paying cash - pay by debit or credit and it's exact). So I made a set of I Have, Who Has to help students practice it.
Curriculum Tags: MAT1L, MAT2L
http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/2015/09/i-have-who-has-making-change-in-canada.html



I think it is always fun to find applications for the fundamental counting principle. And if you didn't know it, there is a new Peanuts movie coming and as a promo you can now "Peanutize" yourself. That is make your own Peanut character. And you do this by choosing a base character, your hair, eyes, mouth, etc So the question would become "How many different characters are possible?" and you could Peanutize yourself in the process.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://www.peanutizeme.com

Why doesn't math show up in the media more often? This post explores that idea. Is it a stigma or that people just don't understand enough about it to recognize that something is news worthy? Regardless, this article from the Columbia Journalism Review explores the idea.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/do_the_math.php

I am sure that many of you have seen the movie Stand by Me. If not, here'e the Reader's Digest version: Inner city LA teacher, against all odds, teaches students calculus. It's based on a true story and I haven't seen it in a while and I wonder if I would like it as much now. Non the less, I was reminded of this earlier this week. It's the rest of the story behind the movie.
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
https://reason.com/archives/2002/07/01/stand-and-deliver-revisited

In the last couple of weeks I have posted videos on both infinity and infinitesimals, I guess this week it's back to infinity. This time from @vihartvihart
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEz-vGJvaik

I really like this recent video fro Vsauce. It covers the idea of the Zipf distribution and uses examples of words in a document to introduce it. This distribution is basically an exponential decay and would be ideal for any class study exponential functions. And if you skip to 14 min you can see a really neat experiment you can do with paper clips to actually create this distribution. I also love that it mentions one of my favourite apps (for years) called Wordcount (do you show up? Petro just squeaks in at the end between showell and zeigler).
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCT4C, MAT4C, MHF4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

I saw this tweet from @mraspinall earlier this week and immediately thought of this image
Curriculum Tags: All
https://twitter.com/ramusallam/status/293775168080314368/photo/1

.@ddmeyer a colleague passed this on to me. Great "pseudo context" reference! pic.twitter.com/htiFqq5e

— Ramsey Musallam (@ramusallam) January 22, 2013

I always like to remind my data management students that we often have fears about things that we shouldn't and don't fear the things that we should (the classic "it's more likely you will get in an accident on the way to the grocery store then a plane crash"). Here's a more relevant one for our kids
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://mashable.com/2015/09/21/selfie-deaths/#LBy5UW545kqV