Jimmy Stewart has nothing on my 4th hour calculus class. Every year at my school the math department does a canned food drive to get food for the local food pantry in our town. It’s become a really big deal; we’ve been told it provides enough food to stock the pantry for several months. As an incentive to the students, we offer them a little extra credit for the first 15 cans they bring in (5 points, which translates to roughly a 1% bump in their grade).
UPDATE: A couple of days after this post originally went up, I was made aware of a new hack that deserved inclusion on this list, expanding it to a top 6. Probably every single student (and just about every teacher) who has picked up a graphing calculator has asked themselves how far the technology can be pushed. What are the limits of a graphing calculator? Without much encouragement from Texas Instruments (actually quite the opposite), a dedicated hacker community has developed over the last few decades to attempt to answer this question.
So if you haven’t heard, it’s Red Ribbon Week, which is a time for students to celebrate a drug free lifestyle. It’s observed at many high schools across America, including the one I work at. For 2011, the theme of Red Ribbon is “Free to Be Drug Free.” Part of Red Ribbon Week at our school is a door decorating contest. With no prompting from me, my 5th hour Pre-Calculus class decided to turn the door into a TI-Nspire CX.
MATHCOUNTS, a foundation best known for their nationwide popular middle school math contests, has announced the start of a new math challenge for students. The new contest, known as the Reel Math Challenge, is quite different from traditional math contests, which typically focus on written or oral exam questions. With the Reel Math Challenge, student teams of four create a math video designed around a problem. The video needs to teach viewers about the problem and demonstrate a real world application of the concept involved.
I need to start this story with a disclaimer. While I learned a bit about groups during my abstract algebra class in my junior year of college, that class was definitely very abstract to me. In other words, I’m unlikely to be able to answer any questions in the comments for this one. That said, the story of one of the men behind the world’s largest proof on the New Scientist is an interesting one.
While a number of news outlets have reported on Beau, the dog who can do math, the Missoulian is one of the few to have a complete story and video up (which is at the bottom of this article). The owner of Beau claims to have taught him how to do simple addition and subtraction as well as a few story problems and even scoring for some games. Beau just indicates his answers with barks.
Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill is sponsoring a contest with $174,000 of prizes on the line called, “This Is My Math.” Starting on September 15, teachers of K-5 students can submit their students math artwork. Notably, the artwork must be submitted in digital form. The kids have a chance to explain their artwork, which is a pretty significant factor in the judging–40%. Contest entries must be submitted by October 29. Beginning on November 11, the public can vote on their favorite entries.
Fermat’s famous quote, paraphrased in a 21st century context Google is celebrating Pierre De Fermat’s birthday with one of the trademark Doodles. The Doodle features a blackboard with Fermat’s Last Theorem. If you’re not familiar with the story of Fermat’s famous theorem, it’s a good one. To oversimplify, Fermat claimed in one of his notebooks that if you took the Pythagorean theorem and substituted larger integers than two for the exponents, there were no “non-trivial” integer solutions to the problem.
Click here to buy the Texas Instruments Little Professor on Ebay. Little Professor–LCD version One of the earliest electronic toys I had (and certainly my first math toy) was the Texas Instruments Little Professor. While I’ve heard some people refer to it as a child’s calculator, that’s really not an accurate description. It was a handheld device that quizzed you on simple math problems. The problems were all simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
I never cease to be amazed by the ingenuity of the Texas Instruments hacker/programmer community. TechCrunch is reporting the release of a web browser for the TI-83/TI-84 family of graphing calculators. This is far from an official Texas Instruments release. Chris Mitchell, “KermMartian,” a Ph.D. student at NYU, has named his creation Gossamer. This a text based browser on the order of Lynx, if any of you can remember that far back.
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