Math Goggles #3 – Ch-ch-chain… of Attributes
Have you ever played a rhyming game? If not, join me for this week’s Math Goggles challenge. If you are new to Math Goggles and not sure what to do and why do it, check out this page first.
The inspiration for this week’s game comes from Malke Rosenfeld who sent me the I Spy in Common board game. The game has lots of tiles with seemingly unrelated pictures on them. That is, unrelated, until you start thinking creatively and finding common attributes on the different tiles.
We are going to play a grown-up version of this terrific game and we won’t need game tiles either. Here’s how – look around the room and choose any object. Now, look around some more and choose another object that shares at least one common attribute with the first object. Next, look for object #3 that has something in common with the object #2. And so on. How many objects can you chain together? For an extra challenge, can you loop back to the object you started with without repeating the attributes?
Here’s what my living room ch-ch-chain looks like:
My phone has lots of buttons and so does my…
… which is also rectangular in shape, just like…
… the bricks on my fireplace which, as you can see, are laid in a very simple pattern that reminds me of…
… this old wooden typeset drawer which is on the wall next to the fireplace and opposite…
this wooden bowl. This is the first non-rectangular object in my chain, so I’m going to add my…
… this round chair that sits next to it. The chair is made of woven rattan…
… which is different from the bamboo used in the blinds except that they are also woven. And you see this thin cord for pulling the blinds up? It brings me back to…
… my laptop and all the cords sticking out of it. And guess what? Since my ThinkPad is black, it shares that in common with… drum roll…
… my phone! (both the buttons and the plastic back)
Ok, so maybe my pictures aren’t all that inspiring (naturally, I blame it on my cheap point-and-shoot camera). In which case, check out the Rhyming Pics project archives (unfortunately, the project is no longer active) for some beautiful pictures. Can you follow the chains and guess the shared attributes in those images?
If you play this game and post it to your blog, Flickr!, Facebook, etc, let me know in the comments.
Posted in Grow
Newsletter January 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 getting the last reviews in from the volunteer reviewers group that had a go before copy editing. I am so happy to get cheers and kudos from respected colleagues in parenting and mathematics! It’s one thing for me to think our team did a good job; it’s another level of happiness entirely to see what others love about the book.
Blogs and networks
We have been making good friends in the Creative Commons crowd, who change the world one open-source program, video or book at a time. We joined the big worldwide celebration of the ten years of the Creative Commons. This is the video of our talk:
Exciting news! Malke Rosenfeld, the creator of the Math In Your Feet program and a math explorer at The Map Is Not the Territory blog, is joining our team. In her first book review called “Hidden math” Malke goes on a scavenger hunt for ideas such as frieze patterns and parallel lines – in books that aren’t math readers! Malke asks: “What other books are out there that have this kind of ‘hidden’ math?” Have you seen any?
Yelena McManaman adds another gem to my growing collection of hundred charts. Check out her post on why this version works well for young kids.
Have you noticed my new fancy steampunk eyewear and a camera? That’s because we started a series of posts called Math Goggles! If you like field trips, you will love these scavenger hunt adventures. Check out the first one, at the high-tech library at NCSU.
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 February 15th!
Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova
Posted in Newsletter
Math Goggles #2 – Home Patternomics
It’s time to put on the Math Goggles (not sure what these are? Head over here to find out). Last week I invited you to search for math at your local library. But this week I haven’t had much free time for impromptu field trips. So I’m donning my goggles and hunting for math around the house. To make things a bit more interesting, I decided to only look for one thing – patterns.
I found my first pattern walking down the stairs. Rise-run-spindle-spindle-rise-run-spindle-spindle… I only have one cat, so the pattern was broken there.
Next I had to put some books away and noticed this weaving pattern on a basket on my bookshelf.
And what about a bookshelf itself? Large shelf, two small shelves, large shelf, two small shelves. Moving to an even larger scale, the furniture arrangement pattern in the room (as noticed by my husband) is “furniture to sit on, furniture to pile books on, furniture to sit on, furniture to pile books on…“
But of all the patterns I found around the house today, this one had to be my favorite. I had to replace batteries in one of the toys and here it was, positive-negative-positive-negative terminals.
What patterns can you find in your house?
P.S. Once you start noticing patterns, it gets very addictive. So here’s a cool and very relaxing idea for a collaborative pattern hunt video I found on YouTube. Next time you have a few minutes to spare, doodle the patterns you notice. Here’re my doodles, including the furniture arrangement pattern, the stairs pattern (reflected and rotated), the batteries pattern and a few more.
Posted in Grow
Book review: “What’s unnatural?” by Jeremiah Dyke
Making abstract entities into characters with their own looks and personalities is a great idea related to many traditions. “Flatland” featured creatures embodying shapes in different dimensions.
More recently, moe anthropomorphisms embody entities such as Wikipedia:
The book “What’s unnatural” by Jeremiah Dyke of Hands on Math has a cute anthropomorphic numeral 1 as its main character. The images overall have peaceful, slow and steady feel to them, which I like a lot.
The character goes through different number lands, largely corresponding to the extension of numbers from natural to real. It’s a useful topic, and representing it spatially makes a lot of sense, given the traditional Venn diagrams showing relationships among numbers.
Here are things I would change in the next version of the book.
Show number properties rather than telling about them. It’s done beautifully for negatives, but not for other number types.
I was concerned about negatives presented as “positive numbers that carry a bar.” A negative number is a single entity, even though it takes two symbols to represent it. The same goes for fractions represented as “numbers chopped into pieces” – a fraction is a number in its own right, a single number at that. This seems like a minor point, but kids get confused around this issue.
I would continue to the land of reals rather than irrationals, because it breaks the previous pattern. Natural-whole-rational-… is the previous adventure, and the next in line seems real, not irrational.
I would use the book with kids for its roleplaying potential, and the strength of its overall travel metaphor. Thank you for making it!
Posted in Grow
