Math Links for Week Ending Sept. 22nd, 2017

Woo hoo, I saw a draft version of this at Twitter Math Camp this year and it seems that it is finally out. Transformation golf is a great way for kids to practice rotations, translations and reflections in a nice dynamic way. I've done a bit of work in this area here and here but the Desmos stuff is so slick your kids will love it.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8
http://blog.desmos.com/post/165555417467/free-new-desmos-activity-transformation-golf

In Ontario, we call them learning goals. Here @mathycathy calls them learning targets. Regardless of the name,  if you have your students keep track of their progress on their learning goals then you might like the way that she has co opted Desmos Activity Builder to do that. Take a look
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.mathycathy.com/blog/2017/09/desmos-learning-target-student-reflections-inspired-by-a-tweet/




In this latest episode of @MyFaveThm they ask @JSEllenberg what his favourite theorem is and it was a neat little ditty called Fermat's Little Theorem. Which basically goes like this. Take any prime number, say 7 and raise 2 to the power of that prime, 27. Then the answer when divided by the original prime 128/7 will always have a remainder of 2. This is easily used in any class where students have to work with expressions and primes. Listen here
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8
https://kpknudson.com/my-favorite-theorem/2017/9/13/episode-4-jordan-ellenberg

I love it when teachers share their entire semester via daily posts. I think that besides this being a great exercise for teachers to self reflect, its great for other teachers to get ideas. In this case, @DaveLanovaz is giving us a day by day for his grade 9 academic math class. Check out the first post here and the rest that follow.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D
http://sine-of-the-times.blogspot.ca/2017/09/mpm1d1-day-1.html

Here is a crazy pattern that might get your kids thinking of Pythagorean theorem and higher dimensions.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mceaM2_zQd8

Last week I someone showed me an order of operations problem that (potentially) had two different answers depending on how it was typed into the calculator. And through the rest of the week I learned that there was an order of operation rule that I had previously been unaware of. That is when you have something like 6/2(3), even though order of operations tells us that we do multiplication and division in the order they appear left to right, the implied multiplication of 2(3) is actually has precedence. There is not a lot of info on this (and I don't know of anyone that teaches this in elementary or secondary school) but clearly it exists as you can see by some of the documentation seen in the tweets that followed my original tweet including a calculator manual page, other calculator examples and the apparent reason (that implied multiplication is treated as a scale factor and thus takes prescience).
Curriculum Tags: All
https://twitter.com/davidpetro314/status/908082923856953345

Is this some new rule I'm unaware of? Maybe @standupmaths knows if it's just this #calculator #mathchat #MTBoS #iteachmath pic.twitter.com/EAJYjFMJ78

— David Petro (@davidpetro314) September 13, 2017