Our professor hit us with these awesome puzzle manipulatives today called "tangrams". There are seven pieces to each one and they fit together to make a myriad of shapes. They are great if you were blessed with spatial awareness. If not, they will cause migraines. We were asked to make a picture of a giraffe using the seven pieces and most of us eventually figured it out. Then she threw this awesome nugget of information at us by saying "now make it twice as large". The math behind it says if you double the height and width of an object you are squaring its area. Therefore for every one piece of tangram used to make the original giraffe you would need FOUR pieces to match the identical area of the double sized giraffe. It was a wicked game, in fact that should be the soundtrack for the rest of this blog.
What else did I learn today you ask?
A Fathom: Not just a unit of measurement equal to 6 feet, or 1.83 meters.....or the lead track to the Little Mermaid Soundtrack, it is the name of software used to graph data in the math world!! It is expensive as heck, but if you want to teach data in an organized and thoughtful fashion then please check it out:
The Data and Story Library: http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/
This place has a plethora of statistical data for you and yours. We were showed a chart that showed the amount of calories in approx 100 hot dogs tested. Next to this info was a list of how much sodium was in that same hotdog. Once again, I have given up hot dogs, but I have gained some new respect for those people we honor by giving them jobs finding out how much sodium and calories are in hot dogs.
How this will help me elucidate my students in the classroom?
With Gapminder, the Tangrams, DASL, and fathom, my students will have statistical data pouring out of their ears. They will be able to read data, decipher data, and come to conclusions about data. That is what all of this leads to, and I love it.
Questions?
Why is it all the good things in life cost a lot of money?
I'll have more thoughts on this as I put it into use over the next couple of weeks.
Good stuff today.
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