Five of us had an IB curriculum day today where we (roughly) sketched out the pacing of our new Pre-Calculus and Pre-Calculus H classes. Very helpful and productive, but boring pictures, so here are some pictures of Calculus Projects:
Parachutes for “Barbies”. They’re investigating the affect weight and size of parachute have on falling speeds.
The beginnings of a pendulum wave “machine”. Very exciting.
A salesman from Nao Robots came by today to pitch the robot for our programming class (and others). Quite expensive. Not sure if it would be worth it. A lot of flash, not sure if there is much bang (is that an expression?). Anywho, here’s a demo of the robot dancing to Gagnam Style.
Some quick code I cooked up for a couple of Calculus Students investigating betting strategies for card counters. They hadn’t programmed before, so I gave them this skeleton code.
[edit: wow, typos]
Here is one student’s work-in-progress final project in computer programming. All the code is his! If you’re on a computer, try it out. Really nifty work for the generic level creator. I’ll have to explain soon.
http://www.greenfoot.org/scenarios/8401
A calc student is working on pendulum waves and she did a video analysis of a youtube video. She drew it on the board, and said it was like a sine graph inside a sine graph. I asked her if it looked like this. Yep! She said that if you drag that “a” slider to larger and larger numbers, then the graph would look like it would with thousands of balls. Neat stuff.
I just knew Daily Desmos would pay off eventually.
Here’s a list of the Calculus Projects. I’m very excited to see how they turn out! Very cool ideas.
Prediction of when the 50 billionth app will be sold in Consumer math. Our prediction of 4:45 was very close; the 50 billion was hit at 5:00.
The PreCalc H class was asked to visualize y=1/(x^2) and then graph it with their arms. Or do the YMCA dance. One of those.
One student is studying the symmetry using Penrose magnets as an example.
Started AP Calculus projects today. Had a lot of help from Bowman in setting up the project. They are researching / creating / presenting on any rigorous math topic of their choosing. Probably the first time in their school mathematical career to be able to choose what math to study. Brought some books in too.
