Math Links for Week Ending March 27th, 2015

Another great product of the MTBoS (Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere) has just launched via @marybourassa. Which One Doesn't Belong (wodb.ca) is a new website that houses a pile of these little square images. You can read about how Mary about how she uses these in her calculus class here (spoiler alert: she is having her students create these) and her grade 10 class with surface area and volume here, and the launch of the website here.
The premise is that we are given four images (numbers, shapes or graphs) and simply asked "Which One Doesn't Belong? Besides the obvious part that starts the conversation about math in your class, the very cool thing about these is that they are constructed so that there is a reason that could be used to suggest any one of the four doesn't belong. So for example looking at the calculus image in the middle (below) the top left doesn't have a max or min, the top right have an asymptote, the bottom left has two vertical asymptotes and the bottom right has an oblique asymptote. The other thing about that is that in those discussions you might find more than one reason for a particular thing to not belong. So for example in the number example below, the 43 doesn't belong because it's a prime number or because it's not a perfect square
Right now, there are three categories: Shapes, Graphs & Equations, and Numbers
Curriculum Tags: All
http://wodb.ca/
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/03/announcing-which-one-doesnt-belong.html
http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2015/03/which-one-doesnt-belong-for-calculus.html

I like when Rhett Allain does his video analysis posts because we can usually bring those into math class. In this particular one the subject is jumping. Specifically jumping competitions. In this case, standing long jump and a height jump. So there is a link to great video that shows good quadratic motion and he does a lot of great analysis that goes way beyond just quadratics.
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P, MCR3U, MCF3M, MBF3C
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/physics-record-breaking-long-jump/

I saw this on Andrew Stadel's blog. He was doing a summary of the week and one part was about a version of War that his colleague made. Different representations of rational number on cards (print them out here). Kids decide which is bigger. You can take out the fraction cards and even do this in grade 8. Check out Andrew's instructions on his site
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
http://mr-stadel.blogspot.ca/2015/03/a-jammed-rational-irrational-war.html


Pi Day leftovers. Wolfram Alpha created a neat little app (http://mypiday.com/) that takes your birthday and finds out where it appears in the first million digits of pi. Fun. Check out their blog post for their PiDay fun and try your birthday out in the PiDay app. Thanks to Sue Latour for pointing this one out.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://mypiday.com/
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2015/03/12/pi-or-pie-celebrating-pi-day-of-the-century-and-how-to-get-your-very-own-piece-of-pi/

Hey, data is good. And if you can find data that might interest students, even better. So here is some data from the TV show Glee. It's just finishing right now but take a look at its viewership over the years. There are some interesting blips that could be easily discussed (like the spike when the episode followed the superbowl)
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/glee-had-a-great-run-but-its-a-shadow-of-its-former-self/



More Piday remnants. This time its an interesting way to connect data to Pi. The question is, how many digits of pi do you have to memorize to be considered "Special". Almost 1000 people were surveyed and here are some results. This might be a neat thing to do in your classes.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-many-digits-of-pi-you-have-to-have-memorized-to-be-special/






When we introduce trig we are supposed to do it via investigation. And if you are going to use investigation, then it is pretty standard to start with similar triangles. Here is a post from Sam Shah that basically gives his whole process. All 135 pages of it. I love it when people share like this and one of the things I like are the 89 pages of right triangles one made with each degree from 1 to 89.
Take a look at the progression of the concepts.
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P
http://samjshah.com/2015/03/25/my-introduction-to-trigonometry-unit-for-geometry/

Nice to see there are some stereotypes that continue to be broken. This pro football player has just published a paper in a math journal.
Curriculum Links: All
http://its-interesting.com/2015/03/19/baltimore-ravens-offensive-lineman-john-urschel-publishes-paper-in-math-journal/

It's always good to have real examples of mathematical concepts. In this video they go over how you can use the 3-4-5 triangle to create a footprint for a construction project with square corners. Then at the end shows how to make sure a quadrilateral is a rectangle by measuring the diagonals. Thanks to Graham Gould for this one.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kZWyU9wyIQ

It's maybe not appropriate for math class (starting with 38 if you don't like guns and then of course .....69 dudes) but here are the first 200 numbers as images via Google image search. It's still pretty neat how some of the numbers are coopted. 

Curriculum Tags: All

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqcVsShxzw8 

Vi Hart release another one of her anti Pi (pro Tau) videos on last weeks Pi Day. Always entertaining.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E9m6yDEIj8

What starts out as a talk about the connection between math and sex turns out to be a talk about patterning and modelling in mathematics.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2vN2QXZGnc

Add this one to your list of coupon images. Which one would you choose?
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
https://twitter.com/davidpetro314/status/579726859916693504

Which coupon would you choose? #mathchat pic.twitter.com/VO8ff6IwFJ
— David Petro (@davidpetro314) March 22, 2015

Some big data on big data. You could easily find some connection to exponential growth here. Thanks to David Broad for this one
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MBF3C, MAP4C, MCT4C, MDM4U
http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/things-know-big-data-infographic/

Math Links for Week Ending June 6th, 2014

Here is a nice panel talk (if you have 90 min to kill) on modelling in math with Steven Strogatz (among others). Its a video but there actually isn't much to see. So you could probably just set it playing while you do other work.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2014/05/go-figure-predicting-the-world-with-math/

Someone has posted all the videos from Joe Boaler's How to Learn Math course. This is an online course that is meant for parents and teachers (apparently there is a separate course for students). Here is the whole playlist.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPMnjU12_V1Io4AV8OeaK958Kr6EC_ovq

It being NHL playoff time Yummy Math has a data set about the longest overtime games. In the regular season, games can end in a tie but in the payoffs the game must be won or lost so the overtimes just keep coming. Its a small data set of the games with the largest number of over time minutes. A nice little data set that you could use for percentages,single variable dot plots, box & whisker plots, average or standard deviation.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://www.yummymath.com/2014/longest-nhl-overtime-games-in-history/

And another one from Yummy Math. This time on movie opening weekends. This data set gives the opening weekend gross for blockbuster movies and couples that with the overall gross. It leaves out the overall gross for the new Godzilla movie (since it doesn't exist). This means this data set would be good for interpolation/extrapolation with scatter plots. They get the data from a great website that I have been using for years, Box Office Mojo. So many different metrics about movies that you can use for any class dealing with data.
Curriculum Tags: MAP4C, MDM4U
http://www.yummymath.com/2014/opening-weekend-3/

A three act math task from Kyle over at the Tap Into Teen Minds site. This time with composite area. Because it's dealing with circles that means it's for grade 9 classes only. I hope you like cookies. Check out the first act below and go to the website for the rest.
Curriculum Tags: MFM1P, MPM1D
http://tapintoteenminds.com/3act-math/cookie-cutter/

I am a big fan of performance tasks for summative assessments. So it's no surprise that I like this one from Alex at Slam Dunk Math. There are a lot of things I like about this one. First it's done board wide so across many schools. Secondly it takes several days and the students co construct the information needed for the task. And thirdly there are a lot of ways for students to participate and be involved. I like how Alex has given detailed instructions and info about how things went. I am going to suggest that Alex post the image files associated with each sheet so that if there are any of us who want to use them it will save us time. Thanks to @MaryBourassa for this one. She did it in her class and has a detailed series of posts about how each day went (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4).
Curriculum Tags: MPM2P
http://slamdunkmath.blogspot.ca/2014/01/using-pictures-to-prepare-for-mfm-2p.html

Here's another one from Alex, this time featuring the cup stacking challenge. I like this for two reasons. One it can be used really easily to visually show the idea of initial value (if you stack them inside each other and keep them linear) and two, I love his pictures of the various cup configurations.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MFM1P, MPM1D, MFM2P
http://slamdunkmath.blogspot.ca/2014/05/open-strategy-cup-stacking.html

When I was at OAME a few weeks ago, I sat in on a session about math tools in the intermediate classroom and learned about the concept of a "field of zeros" when using algebra tiles. So I made this video on how to multiply with them.

Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MFM1P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOGsZ2PFcI8

I just found out that someone else I know has done a TEDx talk. Take look at Amy Lin talk about what it means to think "math-ishly" and then check out her blog: http://amylin.me/
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gW9g8Ofi8A

Can you trademark the Pi symbol? Apparently an artist has tried to do just that (with an added period after it). Then tried to send cease and desist orders to online sites that sold Pi t-shirts. Me thinks the whole thing is performance art though. More info here. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.wcvb.com/video/buzz60/artist-trademarks-pi-symbol-starts-issuing-cease-and-desist-letters/26310610

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the Spurious Correlations blog which shows graphs and data of unrelated things that are correlated with each other. I recently found out that these data sets are all found by software that mines the Internet to find unrelated data sets that can be correlated. So that being said, I think I am going to be posting interesting ones as I see them. Here's one that correlates Nicholas Cage films and number of people drowned by falling into a swimming pool.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://www.tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=9236

This is kind of a neat idea. Make your own math buttons and then sell them on Zazzle. These ones are all to do with calculus. Reminds me a bit of the Big Bang Theory when they made Penny Blossoms (which you can't buy here)
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
http://untilnextstop.blogspot.ca/2014/05/calculus-buttons.html

Do you need some data that might pique the interest of your students? Who knew there was a punch in the face emoji?
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-100-most-used-emojis/

Math Links for Week Ending Mar. 14th, 2014

Even though I posted a Pi Day link last week (to my Pinterest Page), most of the links this week will relate to Pi since today is actually Pi Day. There have been new finds this week including this page of 10 Pi Day lessons, Buffon's needle and these two videos (posted today). One from Numberphile (one of my favourite Pi properties) and the other from Vi Hart (another in her anti Pi Day series).
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.mytowntutors.com/2014/03/pi-day-lessons-top-10-websites-for-pi-day/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUErNWBOkUM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iUh_CSjaSw

Key Curriculum, the maker's of Sketchpad, have really started to include a lot of web based sketches (ie no Sketchpad needed) in this one they have several different derivations of Pi using geometric and dynamic means.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8
http://blog.keycurriculum.com/2014/03/%CF%80-day-2014/











The Language of Functions and Graphs is a resource that might be old but there are a lot of great problems here for the picking. This used to be a paid resource but now its available for free in PDF form, both the black line masters and the teacher resource. Thanks to Michael Pershan and Dan Meyer for this one.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MPM2D, MCR3U
http://www.mathshell.com/materials.php?item=lfg&series=tss

Keith Devlin has written a lot about Fibonacci and he has now put out a new video debunking a lot of the myths about the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://vimeo.com/88132964

Why not at least one image for Pi Day
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.pi314.net/imagespi/Pi_day/2008_PiDayCartoon_Grand.jpg

Here is a neat little poster that talks about different types of numbers. It could be good to start some discussions on what characterizes a number. Thanks to Edudemic for this one.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2012/01/meet-numbers.html

Math Links for Week Ending Mar. 7th, 2014

Seeing as Pi Day is in a week I thought I would put my annual Pi Day post up a bit early. This just comes from my Pinterest Pi Day Page. My favourite video is below. Enjoy. Keep in mind that next year's Pi Day will be even more special since it will be 3.14.15
Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.pinterest.com/davidpetro314/pi-day/

I like this recent post from the Tap Into Teen Minds blog on the importance of conceptual understanding (not just memorization) there has been a lot of discussion of this in recent months so it is quite topical. I especially like the nod to algebra tiles.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P
http://tapintoteenminds.com/2014/03/02/striving-for-deeper-understanding-and-retention-in-math-class/

Combinations with a connection to data management in one of the latests posts from Yummy Math. First determine the number of different types of hot chocolate you can make then see which one is the "healthiest"
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U
http://www.yummymath.com/2014/too-early-in-the-day-for-so-many-choices/

Five year olds can learn to do Calculus. It sounds outrageous but if you are talking about the fundamentals of what calculus is, pattern recognition, then absolutely. Recently I posted an article stating that you never learned math in high school, this article seems to suggest that the opposite can happen.
I think my favourite quote from this article is

The one side says, “drill and kill.” The other says “drill for skill.” Basically, though, just about every mathematician and math education researcher who was interviewed for this story agrees that the perfect math class should have a mix of skills and problem solving. They just can’t agree on the amounts of each, when to add them, and what to skip.

Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/

Probably the most well researched and balanced articles in the "math wars" lately came from the Globe and Mail this week. Definitely well worth the read. There are two quotes I liked the most in this, both from Marian Small. The first one refers to the idea that often teachers teach the most efficient method for doing a problem but what is efficient for them may not be the most efficient for all students:

Dr. Small is showing a third option for two-number multiplication when a father raises his hand and asks: “But what’s the most efficient way?” “What’s your definition of efficient?” Dr. Small responds. “I think it’s probably the calculator.” When a few parents chuckle, she clarifies, “that was only half a joke.”

And I also liked the quote about claiming to not like math or not be good at math. It is a problem that we have with parents.

If you don’t like math, keep it to yourself.” Don’t tell your kids, you were bad at algebra or hated fractions, she explains, cause you’re giving them permission to be the same way.

Curriculum Tags: All
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/why-the-war-over-math-is-distracting-and-futile/article17178295/

On Mike's Math Page, he wrote about a recent Ed Frenkel's Op Ed which was basically the same as his Numberphile video on why people hate math. You can follow all of those links to refresh your mind if you wish. But the thing that Mike reminded me of is this great Richard Feynmen segment where he talks about the problem with math (specifically about algebra)
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW6LYuli7VU

I thought this was a great image of one of the early MacDonald's menus. Not sure from what year but It think you could use it to see if the prices have all proportionally increased since then. Thanks to @thescamdog for this one.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
https://twitter.com/thescamdog/status/439551795388379136/photo/1

I guess showing your work can be different now. Thanks to @thescamdog for this one too.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://twitter.com/thescamdog/status/440944315154452480/photo/1

I thought this one from XKCD was a great example of a cool area plot
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U
http://xkcd.com/1338/

I was in Toronto this week and saw this and thought there must be some way to relate this to parallel lines or angles.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
https://twitter.com/davidpetro314/status/441991510222200832/photo/1

Math Links for Week Ending Jan. 31st, 2014

Do you need a Mile of Pi? That is, would you like to print out over 40,000 digits of pi so if you stretch them out end to end, it will be a literal mile long? This zip file will do it. Sure its 3500 pages long but hey that's only 7 packages of paper. And if you don't want so many pages, this Pi strip is a bit more manageable but only has 1000 digits.
Curriculum Tags:All
http://www.think-maths.co.uk/mileofpi

Need a practical use for statistics? How about gaming the system on the OK Cupid site. There is way more of the data in the actual Wired Magazine (yes the paper copy!).
Curriculum Tags: MBF3C, MDM4U, MAP4C
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/



It's true, Indiana once tried to legislate that Pi would be 3 instead of 3.14159..... For this and other funky Pi facts you can also listen to this awesome radio show by Simon Singh (which is part of this bigger series).
Curriculum Tags: All
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/remember-the-time-indiana-almost-passed-a-law-declaring-pi--3


Need some real world data about Twitter. Just type your hashtag into this site and you will get 24hr worth of data on it.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U, MAP4C
http://www.hashtags.org/how-to/tips/tracking-hashtag-data/




Some really good stuff on authentic assessment from Grant Wiggens. Some of the characteristics that resonate with me are :

• They do not rely on unrealistic and arbitrary time constraints 
• They offer known, not secret, questions or tasks 
• They are not graded on a curve, but in reference to legitimate performance standards or benchmarks 
• They involve transparent, de-mystified expectations 
• They identify (perhaps hidden) strengths [not just reveal deficits]

I think I may have a long way to go to get there but its good to have some guidelines. Thanks to Chad Barett for this one.
Curriculum Tags: All
http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/authenticity-in-assessment-re-defined-and-explained/

It seems that on a regular basis there are new videos produced dealing with the Fibonacci numbers. Here is latest. Its well produced. For an entire course on the Fibonacci numbers you might want to watch this (which is one of 5 videos from this Stanford iTunes U course) or if you want to learn about Fibonacci himself, read this.
Curriculum Tags: All
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9d1mxgZ0ag

I always like when data is put into perspective. Here is a neat way to represent 200 calories.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U, MAP4C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMGUmcveQeg