Hurricane Math is final project from Technology in Math. It explores curiosity questions I had after watching Hurricane Katrina, waiting for Hurricane Rita, and watching Ike live via Internet from Austria.
It is a collection of assignments to be used as a resource when hurricanes are in the news.
It is meant to go beyond typical assignment of- Plot the hurricane track to evaluate the hurricane track. (pre-calculus or calculus)
It main assignment asks the question:
Are there really more hurricanes now than previously? via statistics.What statistical model do hurricanes fit.
It also looks at How good was the hurricane response given how hard hurricanes are to predict.
And the form of the hurricane spiral. There are additional smaller assignments, whose main purpose is to get students to ask their own curiosity questions.
It requires a spreadsheet tool such as MS Excel or Open Office Calc.
Its main assignment is appropriate for a statistics class, but has other exercises exploring hurricanes mathematically.
Excerpt from Original email when turned assignment:
It is a collection of exercises.
Start with: HurricaneMath0GoalsOverview.pdf
It was developed with Open Office Calc (Linux), but was briefly tested with Excel (Windows).
Please let me know you have received this.
Most useful new trick I learned this semester was: Putting a graph on top of a picture.
CAD-3d Nano
CAD-3D is an important tool for teaching 3D Geometry concepts. An object can be build using basic 3D objects like an sphere, cylinder, eclipsiod and boxes together with the operations union, intersection and difference Then objects can be copied, rotated, mirrored and/or shifted. Our end project was to create something like a bridge, building, tractor, device, table setting or whatever we chose to model.
My model was a soccer playing robot named Nano from Aldebaren. Both my universities were in the finals.
It was UT Austin vs. TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology)
It was fun reviewing Greenfoot book and exercises, which use Greenfoot to teach programming via games. The environment is set-up, so it teaching good object-oriented programming incrementally and by example. The tool itself is clean code.
For an idea of what is in the book see the scenarios.
Our Lego project for students was to sort socks.
Project documentation (German)
Sorting socks video
One thing we learned was that arranging the socks in a circle made more sense the linear line used to sort numbers.
As part of our training in this class we:
Build a Lego car and used it to:
Follow a circular line using:
- Lego Mindstorms NXT-G (graphical)
- Lejos - Java JVM that runs on Lego
so we learned to flash the Lego firmware.
Transverse a maze with wood walls (Lejos)
Learned an introduction to sorting by playing a game where we sorted ourselves by the number assigned us.
Additionally I visited and reported on how Hogg Middle School used/taught computers and specifically Lego robotics. They were contacted because they won at tournaments.
And introduced Mrs. North's elementary students to Lego robotics
