Math Links for Week Ending Apr. 1st, 2016

The @GlobalMathDept is just what it sounds like. Much like the MTBoS it's a group of teachers who have linked together not because they work together but because they share the same interest. That interest being seeking out and sharing math PD via the internet. This basically comes in the form of regular webinars on topics of choice. For example last week's topic was about the Desmos Activity builder. In that talk @stcarranza went through three of her activities. The one I liked the best was her intro to trig function transformations. I really liked the way she used "handles" on the function to visually transform it as a stepping stone to the algebra required to transform it. The only thing about that activity was that it used radians. In Ontario, our students study trig transformations with degrees first so I made my own copy of the activity and converted it to degrees. You can see that copy here. Every webinar is recorded and you can see all of the recordings here.
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, All 
https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/56b3e682b884dbd81be6ed09
https://www.bigmarker.com/GlobalMathDept/Desmos-Activity-Builder-Best-Practices-for-Charging-Up-Lessons?bmid=b298b09fe7fe

It's always good when we can give our female students some inspiration. This article highlights three women: "Julia Robinson on Hilbert’s Tenth Problem in number theory, Emmy Noether in abstract algebra and physics, and Ada Lovelace in computer science". Read about them all here
Curriculum Tags: All
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/3-revolutionary-women-of-mathematics/

"Hacker doesn’t deny the virtues of differential equations for budding engineers, but he argues that the way we teach math to millions of other students is deeply flawed and morally misguided. It alienates and fails many"

That is the premiss of this article about why we need to fix math by redefining it. Thanks to @mathletepearce for this one.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160324-math-stem-education-hacker-opinion/

An article about a professor who redesigns his loft using the Fibonacci sequence in my hometown paper? Nice.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.windsorstar.com/..+math+professors+redesign..loft

A nice little description of the idea of false positives in probability
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xlOm2wPAA

And the Extra bit on false positives
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFNJc6gsap4

So this kind of going along (a bit) with the above article about changing math education. The difference is that the impetus for this report was some Fox news person complaining about how they need to get rid of algebra cuz it's hard. Short sighted, of course, and even though they conclude that they shouldn't, their reasons aren't all good. But perhaps it's still a conversation starter.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT2zfLKbrU0

A fun video from @standupmaths where he tries to flip alternating heads and tails 10 times in a row. A great video where you can have your students guess how many takes he had to do in order to finally get 10 in a row. In fact, he has a contest to see how many times he flipped the coins to get 10 in a row. If you hurry, perhaps you can put a guess in.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHU-L3BLd_w