Lookit what @ddmeyer made me do. http://t.co/a7TxY3iless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone 
Favorite 
Retweet 
Reply
Kate Nowak
k8nowak
Mandelbrot
Great stuff. Kate got the idea from the blogfather – Dan Meyer.
So I got inspired:
A Recursive Process
Math teacher seeking patterns.
Posted in interesting stuff
1 Comment
Password Strength
To add to this excellent xkcd comic, the following site also exists : Password Haystacks.
Which is a stronger password?
T@+t0O
or
dudewhatdoesmytattoosay
(Click to find out, I’ll wait).
Pretty sweet indeed. What a difference.
Anyways, the reason I’m linking this stuff is that this would make a great lesson in exponents. While the first password uses far more letters and symbols, so it has a large base, since the power is only 6 there aren’t as many permutations to try. But the second password’s power of 23 fully compensates for the smaller base of letters to check.
The buy-in for this type of problem is that I’d bet that most students would pick T@+t0O as the stronger password. It’s a fun day in math class when you can fight (false) intuition.
Posted in interesting stuff
5 Comments
Hurricane Irene – Logarithmic Spiral?
Does Hurricane Irene fit a logarithmic spiral?
I made a Geogebra applet to see if it does. Enjoy.
Parametric equation:
Python Challenge
Python Challenge is a “programming riddle” on the internet.
What is the Python Challenge?
The Python Challenge is a set of riddles that require a little bit of Python programming to be solved. The solutions are entered by changing the address of the page (URL). You get used to the idea pretty fast after solving the first few levels.What’s the purpose of the Python Challenge?
I’ve written the challenge in hope that it will provide an entertaining way to explore the Python Programming Language. It is a way to demonstrate the great power of Python’s batteries.
It’s very much like Project Euler mixed with an online scavenger hunt. You put your answer to a question into the web address, and you get the next part of the riddle. Awesome.
First page of the riddle:
Transport $12 billion of gold #anyqs
From Bloomberg:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ordered the central bank to repatriate $11 billion of gold reserves held in developed nations’ institutions such as the Bank of England as prices for the metal rise to a record.
Venezuela, which holds 211 tons of its 365 tons of gold reserves in U.S., European, Canadian and Swiss banks, will progressively return the bars to its central bank’s vault, Chavez said yesterday. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Barclays Plc (BARC), and Standard Chartered Plc (STAN) also hold Venezuelan gold, he said.
How? An article from Reuters looks into the options that Chavez has for transporting this massive amount of gold.
Some questions arise:
- Visually, how much gold is this? (Wolfram Alpha makes this trivial. Awesome and annoying all at once.)
- If we rented a commercial airline, how many trips would this take?
- How many Flavor Flav grill’s is this to transport?
- How many balloons would this take to float it to Venezuela, Up style?
- How many trips on Southwest with two bags of < 50 pounds of free checked luggage is this?
Any other questions?
Changes to Intro to Computer Programming
This will be my third year teaching Introduction to Computer Programming. The first year I had 15 students which was a good showing, but last year I only had 5 students. It turned out to be a scheduling issue, but I was still worried about the health of the course, and whether or not it would continue to be offered. Good news is that there are about 30 kids enrolled this year, so there are two sections. Enough inside baseball.
I’d like to outline some of the changes that will be made for this upcoming year.
-
Standards Based Grading
The majority of the grade for this class will now be based a list of skills. Unlike in math, there will still be significant other parts of the grade (like projects) but the SBG list will be the majority of the grade. I’ve just made up the following list of skills for class, so this list will be volatile. A massive benefit to being the only person who teaches this course, is that things can change quickly on my whim. It’s a luxury.
List of standards for class. -
Robots
I saw these Finch robots in a news article somewhere and asked our District Technology Head to buy one for testing.They are pretty cool. No batteries or wireless connectivity so the cost is quite low (~$90 each). A bunch of different features, and the Development Environment is already fleshed out. You can program the robots using all the languages that we’ll be using in class (Java, Greenfoot, and Python). I was lucky enough to get a class set of robots. Super excited. Kids will love them. -
Python
After “discovering” Python this past year and throwing it at the kids and seeing some great success, Python will replace parts of the previous Alice and Java curriculum. Python code is as clean as it gets, and it’s also quite powerful. I’d actually say that its the best “learning” language I’ve seen. Java really sucks for beginning programmers, the conventions and syntax are just painful. Python is simply the best.
-
Project Euler
I’ve already written a love letter to Project Euler. I’ll be expanding on PE this year with the students. There are probably 10 problems that any Intro to Programming student should be able to solve (with some help). The best can grow from there. -
Greenfoot
This tool makes Java extremely approachable for the beginning student. Greenfoot is a 2D development environment for Java and it allows students to easily manipulate complicated environments. The best thing about this tool is simplicity in describing objects and object inheritance. If we have 3 different things (eagle, fish, minnow) that all can move, should we make the same move command in each object type? Or should we put all three of these in an Animal class that has a generic move command so that they all get it from inheritance. I had struggled on explaining this concept to previous students, but this exact case came up in Greenfoot and it was much easier to explain with this example.
Also Greenfoot makes creation of a game quite easy.
(My Greenfoot game: Chuck Norris Shooter.)
Click on image to play game.
(edit: Forgot to mention the following!)
-
Fantastic Resources
There are a bunch of great free(!) or cheap resources that I’ve found online to help the students out.-
Dive Into Python is a great book for learning Python.(dead site, thanks Melissa Holmes!) Python Scripting: Overview. - How to Count is a nice book to remind you of the basics.
- Learn Python the Hard Way is a superb DIY guide to learn python and programming.
- Think Python is an open source book that is very handy.
-
I don’t think many of my 3 readers are Computer Science people, but please let me know what you think. Also let me know if I’m missing something important or there is some great tool out there that I should know about. Thanks!
Posted in Full Posts
Tagged computer science, finch robot, greenfoot, project euler, python, sbg
16 Comments
Why Hello…
I’m updating the hosting of the blog (among other things), so please stay tuned. Cheers. Dan.
Posted in interesting stuff
Leave a comment
Ants: Any questions?
Teachers and Jobs Outside the Classroom Poll
@fnoschese retweeted the following stat on twitter:
It seemed a bit low to me, so naturally I started a totally unscientific poll. Please go here and fill out at least one of the questions. The results will be posted back here in a couple of days. Thanks much.
Dan
One Zipper Unfoldings of Polyhedra
From Make.
Just discovered this fascinating little geometrical recreation at the 2011 Bridges Math Art Conference galleries. The idea is simple, and the field still fairly unexplored, from what I can tell. What interesting 3D shapes can be made by zipping up the edges of a planar shape using a single zipper?
A bit of Googling brought me to the homepage of Macarthur fellow Erik D. Demaine, whose work in origami and other geometrical fields we have featured here many times before. You can click on his name at the bottom of this post to see our aggregated past coverage of Erik’s work.
Pretty great stuff.