Newsletter October 15, 2012
Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Moby’s mail
Bon “Math is not a four letter word” Crowder of, you guessed it, MathFour.com asks:
Hey Moby!
Can I post this picture on my site? The ant one? And to where should I link and attribute it if so?
Thanks!
Glad you asked! It reminded me I need to put a licence on the newsletters (see below) and the website. Yes, I am happy for you to use this or any other picture, with attribution to MoebiusNoodles.com
Dor Abrahamson of UC-Berkeley shares a lovely story about his family. Gabi is Dor’s wife and Neomi is their daughter. This story goes with our chapter on intrinsic multiplication! Do you have a Moebius Noodles story? Write me!
We were eating home-made Mexican food with my parents, who’re visiting here.
My dad asked why the brown paste is called ‘re-fried‘ beans.
Gabi said she’s not sure, but she guesses it’s cooked twice.
I said, “What if they cooked it yet again — they’d have to call it ‘re-re-fried‘ beans!”
Neomi said, “No, ‘re-re-fried beans’ would mean they cooked it four times.”
I asked, “How come?”
And Neomi said, “Because the ‘re’ at the beginning means you have to do the ‘re-fried’ over again, so that’s two times twice, so that’s four.”
I stammered something about sequences vs. nested structures, but that was where Neomi lost me and dug into the avocado.
The ant picture Bon liked is an example of a nested structure, too.
Book news
We’ve finished the first draft of illustrations and layouts for all chapters. In the coming weeks, we will put it all together as the finished book. It is a rather surprising amount of work, considering the writing and the illustrations are done! We need to figure out pages, introductions, covers and so on. At the same time, we will be discussing chapters with volunteer reviewers.
The cover is in the early stages of design. We know the elements we want on it, but not how they will come together – or their particulars! We want a big picture of kids, playing with complex math objects, and then some recognizable graphic elements that can be reused for other books in the Moebius Noodles series. Your ideas are very welcome. Here is an early draft.
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 October 30th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Grow
Newsletter September 30, 2012
Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Moby’s mail
Thank you for offers to help review the book before it goes out! And for kind words, like these:
Anna Weltman of the Math Munch crew – a group of bloggers who will review together – writes: “I’m really excited, too! I’ve been looking forward to reading your book ever since I found out about it.”
Brendan Murphy, of “Philosophy without a home” offers: “I’d love to help doing reviews.” I also could not help but steal (with attribution) a part of his signature: “You do not study mathematics because it helps you build a bridge. You study mathematics because it is the poetry of the universe. Its beauty transcends mere things.” – Jonathan David Farley, NY Times letter.
We only have two chapters left to lay out and to illustrate. Then we’ll work with reviewers. I am very much looking forward to discussions with all you fabulous math lovers!
Book news
I have to confess I love fractals. This is a bit trivial, as confessions go. It is like saying, “I love music, food and holidays.” So does everyone else! Even people who don’t know the word “fractal” have seen, and liked, the ubiquitous pretty pictures.
However, not all of us (humans or whales) realize that much of the math behind fractals is very intuitive. It is the basis of traditional storytelling and the crafts of many tribes. It is also accessible to young kids, even toddlers!
Last week our illustrator, Ever, worked on the chapter about iconic fractals. He wanted to make a tree-type fractal, based on 3 “branches” and made out of creatures:
However, the number 3 is not typically associated with worms. We wanted our 3 to be more iconic, so we used an ant! Ant bodies consist of three major parts. If you want to know, they are called head, thorax (the “chest”) and gaster (the “stomach”).
But wait, there are two “branches” of the tree fractal on the ant’s gaster and none on the head! The ant does have three parts, but they are not used, one-for-one, in the structure of the fractal! The artistic reason was the smallness of the head, which is correct anatomically. And the artistic solution was to “cartoon” the ant, making its head large. I think it’s cute. It also expresses the math we need.
This is the sort of conversation I often have with three- to six-year-old kids. They use stamps or stickers or their own hands to make fractals. What number goes with what image? Where do you “branch” your fractal? How do you keep the pattern? What sizes do you choose for different parts?
Fascinating! The same ideas and thoughts come up in the work of little ones and of grown-ups! These must be deep and lovable ideas. Like music, food and holidays.
Talk to you again on October 15th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
Newsletter September 15, 2012
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
There are just a few chapters left to illustrate. This should be all done by the beginning of October, when we start rounds of final reviews. If you would like to participate in reviews, drop me a note!
One of the main ways we make mathematics accessible to babies and toddlers is… symbols.
“Wait, what?” – you may ask. Isn’t symbolic mathematics harder than hands-on work?
It depends on what types of symbols we use. Here are a few examples.
“Baby signs” are hand gestures parents and kids establish for everyday needs of the baby, such as “Bring me that thing” or “More food” or “Pick me up.” Yes, a hand gesture is a type of a symbol.
Have you ever met a toddler who is crazy about horses, or in love with trucks? Anything referring to the beloved topic, such as a saddle or a wheel, will be dear to that child’s heart. Marketers know this and decorate pajamas, pens or backpacks with horseshoes or hot trucks. A saddle is not just a saddle – it’s a symbol of riding, caring for horses, and a whole world of interesting horse-related things!
Kids around the age of four of five often fall in love with particular colors. A child may only want to wear yellow shirts, or to build with yellow blocks and to draw with yellow markers. More often than not, colors have deep symbolic meaning to children. One mainstream example is “pink” symbolizing “ballet” for kids who love to dance. Sometimes these color symbols come from the media. For example, most cartoon characters have their colors, such as Batman and black. Of course, color combinations are symbols for a lot of things too – like green+red for winter holidays, or colors of its flag for a nation.
Here are two examples from the Moebius Noodles book. In the chapter on mirrors, we switched from formal symbols (numbers and multiplication signs) to visual diagrams that are more accessible:
And here are symbols for function machines in this incredible triple composition! Can you guess what the functions do? Three-year-old kids with whom we work can!
Our blogs
“The favorite number of Count von Count from Sesame Street was 34969. Why? And what is YOUR favorite number?” – was our question on Facebook.
Paul Solomon’s answer:
My favorite is 27. 3 is lovely, but this is 3^3. Also, I was born on May 27, lived at 27 Midpark, and other such connections. 27 is for me. :)
Read more on his blog post “Exponents and the scale of the Universe” where this picture can be found. Talk about visual symbols!
Talk to you again on September 30th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
Newsletter August 30, 2012
Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Moby’s mail
As Sue VanHattum guessed, my native language is Whalish. And now Ever discovers my favorite color is 33 80 DE. Translated from Whalish (hexadecimal, base 16) into human, these are three numbers:
51 128 222
coding red-green-blue parts of a color. You can see there is not much red (51), but a whole lot of blue (222), mixed with about half as much of lovely green (128). The color of endless oceans and evening skies!
The topic of different number bases was made somewhat accessible to young children in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century. There are already many games and stories about it. The main thing parents need to know is that young kids love small bases. Base 16, which digital artists use, is no good for toddlers, and neither is, sadly, base 10 that most humans use. Little kids need tiny bases – binary (2), ternary (3) or at most base 5. But this is a not a tiny topic – we will explore it on the blog!
– I thought Moby needed some color, hahaha… I hope you like :) – Ever Salazar
– Thank you, Ever. Not just “some” color, but my favorite color! I like! – Moby
Book news
Mathematics is deeply playful. How deeply? It’s fractally playful! It’s playful at every conceivable scale of resolution! Zooming in on any part of any mathematical endeavor finds parts every bit as playful as the whole.
Why is mathematics playful?
How can people who are not mathematicians experience math play?
Both questions have the same answer, which is, in turn, a question: WHAT IF?
If I weren’t a whale and could climb, I would shout “What if?” from the roofs of the tallest buildings, because the world needs more of it. Mathematics is playful because it constantly asks this silly, hilarious, game-like question, “What if?” You can experience math play if you ask this question, a lot. What if you make parallel lines intersect? (Non-Euclidean geometries.) What if you took square roots of negative numbers? (Complex numbers.) What if you divided by zero? (Infinity, which young kids love.)
The chapter we worked on this week is about composition of functions. It uses a lot of animal examples. What if dogs had 8 legs? What if you could reverse time and turn hens into baby chickens? What if you used a spinner instead of a die in your favorite game? Play on!
Our blogs and lapware
Mobius strips
Yelena describes storytelling play involving mobius strips, inspired by the lovely Vi Hart video “Wind and Mr.Ug.” We highly recommend the story and the video to you and your kids!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mdEsouIXGM
Velocity Raptor
http://www.testtubegames.com/velocityraptor.html
From our Facebook write-up: “Lapware: A game about relativity theory, accessible to young kids. Play past level 4 for cool effects that blow your mind! I am sitting here laughing out loud as the dinosaur makes the room around him stretch in bizarre ways as he runs at near-light speeds. Thank you for the link, Chris Hazard!”
Talk to you again on September 15th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
