Maths and seabirds
Hi, I am looking for someone to teach me and my kids (9, 7) about the maths involved in the calculations sea birds make when diving.. any ideas who I could contact? Or even documentaries?
Thank you @Maria Droujkova and sorry I didn’t see this response until now. We do have a group of homeschoolers we can do this with! But.. we are not near you, or near the beach.. we’re in outback Australia in the middle of a drought and all our water birds have left.. check out what’s left of our waterhole., I’d love to say we would be able to do this and watch birds diving again in a month or so, but who knows!
Wow, that's some major drought! The lake looks more like a big puddle. I hope the rains come soon! Meanwhile, there are online videos, and maybe experiments with model birds children can make out of paper? It's like the popular project for young engineers where they build their own paper bridges. But with birds!
Wow Maria you seem to be able to answer a lot of questions! Thank you for your responses.
Hello,
This sounds like a perfect project for a small math circle, where grown-ups help children pursue their curiosity. A search found that the scientists do indeed research this question, for example: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/43/12006
This has not yet been made accessible to young children:
If you would like, we can adapt it for children. They will probably make a model of a bird at home and gather some data. For example, they can build the neck out of more and more LEGO blocks and then record from what height they must drop their model into the bathtub (for each neck's length) so it breaks. This way, they can research the optimal length of the neck.
Would you like to make this happen?
