Newsletter April 30, 2013
I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Book news
This week, the paper books will be on the way to the crowdfunder supporters and to the first buyers. I am happy with the quality of the paper, the binding, and the colors. Yes, it is great to hold this object, this physical book in your hand! Once the book arrives, please send us photos of yourselves and your kids enjoying it. We are starting a collection!
There are two translation efforts under way: Russian and Persian. If you are interested in translating the book into your language, please let me know.
We are starting to meet with parent, educator, and techie groups interested in implementing the book ideas and more. There is much hunger for advanced, playful math that children make for themselves – following their unique dreams and needs. We are working on support systems for people who pledge to this cause, so we can meet one another, and find as much resources and encouragement as needed to help the children. Everywhere we bring these ideas, there are offers of support from parents, educators, and business leaders.
If you would like us to meet with parents in your learning coop or playgroup, in person or online, let me know!
Blogs and networking
We had to make a mirror for the site, because the traffic exceeded limits several times in the last weeks. Welcome, new friends and colleagues!
Math Forum at Drexel, one of the oldest and largest math educator hubs online, included news of the Moebius Noodles book launch in its April newsletter. This is the feature icon they gave us:
It has a dragon curve on it – quite appropriate for the adventurous math! The dragon curve also goes well with our chapter on fractals. You can use it to make up other roleplaying fractal curves.
Moebius Noodles had a guest post at the Scientific American’s blog on raising science-literate kids. Here is the beginning of the post:
Children dream big. They crave exciting and beautiful adventures and they love to pretend-play. Just ask them who they want to be when they grow up. The answers will run the gamut from astronauts to zoologists and from ballerinas to Jedi masters. So how come children don’t dream of becoming mathematicians?
Kids don’t dream of becoming mathematicians because they already are mathematicians. Children have more imagination than it takes to do differential calculus. They are frequently all too literate like logicians and precise like set theorists. They are persistent, fascinated with strange outcomes and are out to explore the “what-if” scenarios. These are the qualities of good mathematicians!
Sharing
You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com
More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA
Talk to you again on May 15th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
Newsletter April 15, 2013
I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
BIG NEWS!
This week, I am a believer in the goodness of the Universe, and in the power of the people: “Where there is a will, there is a way!” Hundreds of parents, mathematicians, and educators gave advice, tested games with their kids, shared stories and ideas, debugged the math, crowdfunded the project, helped to spread the word, and cheered one another on.
And finally, the Moebius Noodles book – your book – is here! THANK YOU!
Reviewers say the book is beautiful, smart, and meaningful. I am in love too! It also has an open license, so you are welcome to remix the games, translate the book into other languages, and show the book to friends and colleagues. You can preview pages, buy the paperback or download the PDF here: https://naturalmath.com/TheBook Please spread the word!
For supporters who crowdfunded the project: your copies of Moebius Noodles will be on the way within the next few weeks.
What is next? First and foremost, we will be helping more and more people to play adventurous Moebius Noodles math with their kids, and to discuss it with like-minded grown-ups. That will be the goal of virtual and physical book tours, workshops, and events. At the same time, we will be working on other authoring projects inspired by the success of the first one.
Available now:
- Question and answer hub about young math http://ask.moebiusnoodles.com/index.html
Coming soon:
- James Tanton and the Moebius Noodles crew adapt ten powerful problem-solving techniques for toddlers and young kids
- Oleg Gleizer and Olga Radko use the Moebius Noodles co-creation process to make a booklet on combinatorics (Young diagrams)
- A large group (anonymous for now) puts together a collection of calculus games, fables and jokes (short-hand abstractions) accessible to five-year-olds
Join us for more adventurous math for the playground crowd!
Sharing
You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com
More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA
Talk to you again on April 30th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
What Would You Rather Have – Commutative Property Game
Is 2*3 different from 3*2? My answer used to be “But of course! Don’t you know the commutative property?” Now, after following Malke Rosenfeld’s exploration of multiplication, I answer it with a lot more non-committal “it depends“. And I notice more and more examples when even though quantitatively, 3*2=2*3 and 8*1=1*8 and 3*5=5*3, qualitatively you sometimes get two distinctly different results.
Ironically, as I’m moving from quantity toward quality, my 6-year old is moving in the opposite direction. Consider these two examples:
Remember Maria’s review of Clap, Drum and Shake It by Marcia Daft? In particular, this part:
Do more multiplication. In particular, invite kids to multiply within pattern units. For example, how do you double the pattern unit “clap, clap, shake”? That is, how do you show 3×2 in the language of the book? “Clap, clap, shake; clap, clap, shake” is what the book does. You can also do “clap, clap, clap, clap, shake, shake”!
Two months ago I tried it with my son using 3 colors of PostIt notes instead of printed cards. He concentrated on the qualitative aspect (the patterns) rather than on the quantitative side (6 elements total) and insisted that the two strings had nothing in common.
Me: “But you said this one had 6 PostIts and the other one had 6 PostIts”.
Him: “But these are not the same 6s, Mom.”
Yesterday we finished listening to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” audio book. After giving the story some thought, my son asked me: “Do you know what it’d be if there were two Chitty Chittys?” He then explained that it’d be “Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang Bang”. He then went on to tell me what three Chitty Chittys would be like. You guessed it: “Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang”.
Me: Can two also be “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?”
Him:”Sure because you know, Mom, it’s the same thing”.
Which reminds me of a story we recently re-read. It was a chapter from the Karlson on the Roof by Astrid Lindgren. In it, a little boy says that he will have one birthday cake with eight candles on it (1*8); to which his friend adds that it would be a whole lot better to have eight cakes with one candle (8*1).
It also reminds me of a video in which Malke’s daughter is sharing her perspective on the quality vs. quantity issue.
What do you think? Share your examples of when you’d rather have a*b than b*a.
Posted in Grow
Newsletter March 30, 2013
Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Book news
We are polishing the book landing page. It will have a short Moebius Noodles declaration of principles, previews of pages, quotes from reviews, and so on. We need to find a balance between greeting newbies first coming upon Moebius Noodles – and displaying photos, questions and answers, and game ideas from people already involved with the project.
The book is a beginning. It is an invitation to join the Moebius Noodles movement!
How do you join? Questions are at the heart of learning mathematics. To join Moebius Noodles movement, ask a question!
The powerful enterprise software for questions and answers is provided to Moebius Noodles by DZone, a publisher and a community of software developers. The leaders of DZone believe in supporting excellent mathematics education for the next generation of technologists.
Blogs and networks
Math Goggles #9 invites you to seek math in your child’s favorite cartoons:
This week’s Math Goggles challenge is very simple – watch one of your child’s favorite cartoons and look for math in it. If it seems interesting, intriguing, strange, weird, and worth investigating, look further into it. Yep, that’s it! Here’s how it worked out for me…
Math Goggles #10 is a series of challenges about slicing bagels. It starts simple: can you slice into two pieces? Can you slice so that the cross-section is two circles? Then it gets involved, all the way to trefoil knots and mobius strips.
David Coffey started a meme on making every day mathematically special. Try it with your kids! Ask them for their favorite numbers, and celebrate when those days come up. Our examples are on the blog; here’s one for today, 3/30:
Sharing
You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com
More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA
Talk to you again on April 15th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
