Blabbering Pine Marten

I just got back from iMATHination math/science/technology conference where I shared the exciting features of the TI-Nspire CX CAS and the TI-Nspire Navigator. It was quite an adventure getting to the conference at the Q Center in St. Charles, West of Chicago. While driving up there, 6-9 inches of snow came down. The last hour of the drive turned into 4 hours. I grateful to have made it there safely and in time to give my Friday nigh Math Bash presentation called "Hands-on Learning of Slope: Math and Science Connections with the TI-Nspire CX CAS, Navigator and the Vernier DataQuest Application."

From one of the sessions I attended I learned about a website called Blabberize.com. My second oldest daughter used it to do her science project. When making the mouth, the large green dot indicates how low the mouth will drop. It was hilarious fun to make. Enjoy the production.

Update: If we would have watched this video tutorial, it would have been even easier to make our first 'Blabber.' Exploring is nice, but trial and error can be time consuming. I also discovered an example of how this Web2.0 tool can be using in the mathematics classroom.

I wonder if this blabberizing animals can be considered an application of Genesis 1:28 - having dominion of living things that move on the earth.

Pressure Sensor - Work

The students are doing a lab to better understand the relationship of pressure and volume, also known as Boyle's Law. They will also find work by using the Vernier DataQuest application on the TI-Nspire.

The following video shows the set up and the experiment. A screen shot showing the analysis done to find work follows.


To find the work, the area under the P-V diagram, use menu Analyze, Integral. It is important that the work is negative. Why is it negative?

STEM Project ... wind

Today was another windy day in Indiana.
God is in control of the wind. In Mark 4 (and parallel passages in Matthew 8 and Luke 8) the disciples were in a boat with Jesus when a great windstorm arose. They thought they were going to drown. Jesus got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

Jesus also spoke of our limited knowledge of the wind when he was talking to Nicodemus (in John 3). He said, "You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

For the TI-Nspire STEM Project Challenge, students are to select a topic of interest that they want to investigate and explore, based on an issue or problem in the community (local, state or national) that they wish to change.

An interesting topic to investigate and explore is getting energy from WIND.

Within the past several years, Indiana has become the home of many wind farms. Is wind power an answer to our nation's problem of dependence on foreign oil? The rising cost of energy makes us wonder what can be done to reduce our reliance on 'disposable' energy. Is wind energy a viable solution for home and business energy in our area? Let's study wind turbines, rotational motion, wind power and energy.

In the next weeks and months, my students will share laboratory experiments they have done with the TI-Nspire Lab Cradle and Vernier sensors and summarize their findings from the following links.

- Small Wind Electric System: An Indiana Consumer's Guide http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/pdfs/small_wind/small_wind_in.pdf
- Purdue University's Windy Energy website
- Geographic Information System for Renewable Energy http://www.esri.com/library/bestpractices/renewable-energy.pdf
- Instructions to construct and Windbelt generator
- Kid Wind Project - Humdinger Windbelt kit
- Wind for Schools & Skystream
- Popular Mechanics - Windbelt
- Wind Power in Indiana

Recently an update about the potential for wind energy was published. This shows that Indiana could generate 443 TWh annually. For comparison, Indiana consumed less than 107 TWh of electricity in 2005. However, in 2010, the state only produced 1.24 TWh of electricity (which is better than many of our neighbors, but not in the top 5. Two of our wind farms did make the top 10 list.)

STEM Project Challenge ... ideas

This summer our school was accepted to participate in the TI-Nspire STEM Project Challenge. I am so excited about how well this fits in with what we are doing and my goals for my students, and not just the AP Physics & Calculus students, but also the Physics First freshmen.

Like with the NASA Student Launch Initiative we participated in years ago where Covenant Christian High School received a several thousand dollar contract with NASA, we wanted to come up with an idea that was truly worthwhile. See point#3 on this Covenant NASA-SLI website.

We began brain storming ideas. Some of these are recorded on this website. (There are also some fun pictures of how we are using the TI-Nspire in class, which sometimes means outside.)
I wonder which of the ideas listed, sound most interesting to you?

An idea the students got excited about that didn't make the list was to make a jet pack. In researching that, they came upon an impressive (and hilarious) water jet pack.

Why I Nspire? Part 5 - The List

Features that I find worthwhile about the TI-Nspire CAS include:

• CAS stands for Computer Algebra System. This is great for exploration & discovery of mathematical concepts. It can serve as a ladder to help student reach new mathematical heights.
• Resolution – it has more pixels than any other TI graphing calculator.
• The grayscale was nice (color on the software), but now the TI-Nspire CX CAS includes color! This really is extremely helpful for engagement and enhances understanding. With color graphs I've seen freshmen exploring some advanced transformation, and seniors creating amazing 3-D shapes and animations.
• Images can be inserted.
  
• Geometry is integrated. No more going to the computer lab for those geometry classrooms. Now dynamic geometry can be in the hands of of every student! This also means lots of great simulations can be and have been made.
• Animation and sliders!
• Notes - makes it so much more of a teaching and learning tool.
• History preserved. Where did a student go wrong? Copy the history.
• Computer short cuts, like CTRL C, V, X, S, Z. (There are more shortcuts listed for "Dummies" here.)
• Content, content, content! There are many inquiry activities that have been written. See TImath.com or MathNspired.com. Also there are textbooks that integrate the use of the TI-Nspire, or as in the case of the Pearson/Prentice Hall textbooks for Algebra 1, Alg 2, and Geometry that now also address the Common Core Standards, the book is on the TI-Nspire.
• Incredibly easy to use data collection. There are so many Vernier probes that automatically work. There is no better way to learn slope or develop an understanding of derivatives and integrals than with real-world applications, like actually walking and seeing data in real-time with a CBR2 motion detector.
• Demonstrations – powerful visuals & multiple representations
• Graph function, polar, parametric, implicit, DE slopefields and more on the SAME screen at the same time!
• Exam acceptance. The TI-Nspire CX CAS is permitted on the AP, PSAT, SAT exam. The TI-Nspire is also allowed on the ACT, IB, and many state end-of-course assessment exams (including Indiana where I'm from). See part 3 blog entry.

• Don't forget all the research (part 1),
• MathPrint (part 4), and the
• software (part 2) that is included.

Learn more about these, like how to make and use sliders, in the Getting Started or Intermediate Users High School Math workshops this summer. Currently I know I'm hosting one in Indianapolis, and I may be called upon to be the instructor for a workshop near Orlando, Florida in the middle of June.

Trip To KSC for NASA Student Symposium

Last Saturday I was heading back home after an amazing trip with two students who participated in the NASA Explorer School's Student Symposium. One of the students suggested I take pictures of the new TI-Nspire CX CAS as it 'visits' various sites on the trip. The image to the left is the Nspire with the Space Shuttle Endeavor just before its last launch. It is scheduled to take off Monday morning. Especially now that the AP Calculus exam is past, teachers may enjoy incorporating shuttle launch data with the technology they have in their classroom (TI-84 or Nspire) by doing a NASA Math & Science @ Work activity. There is also an algebra 1 activity about for the Space Shuttle Ascent.

Part of the inspiration for doing the research that these two freshmen pursued was the NASA Exploring Space through Math Weightless Wonder activity. They used the TI-Nspire and CBR2 motion detector to consider the parabola formed by a ball rolling on a ramp. I posted their PowerPoint presentation on our school's website.

Besides seeing the Endeavor, some highlights from the trip were hearing from the director of the Kennedy Space Center and former astronaut Robert Cabana, talking to astronaut and physicist Samuel Durrance, and hearing from a panel of NASA scientists and employees to encourage the students to pursue the challenging courses. The students got some great advice.

Update: I just got word about a Google Earth plug-in that lets you watch the space shuttle trajectory in real-time. It is similar to the what can be done with the calculus activity that was mentioned above, except this is LIVE. I think this will be particularly interesting when it takes off and lands. Endeavor is scheduled to land at 2:30 a.m. (Eastern time zone) June 1st, and the last shuttle should launch in July.
It requires the desktop version of Google Earth (free download here): http://earth.google.com/

Once you have Google Earth on your machine, just download the .kmz plugin below to your desktop and click it to start. It’s still in beta-mode so those involved in the development of it at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston would love to have feedback from teachers and students on what they think. Let me know and I'll pass on the feedback.
http://etouch.cust.footprint.net/LiveSpaceShuttle.kmz

Inserting Images on the TI-Nspire

[Update: Videos about images on the handheld and what can be done with the TI-Nspire Navigator are now available on youtube. To transfer a file that you inserted an image on from the computer to your handheld, try this video tutorial. The basic insert image tutorial is here.]

Diagrams and pictures can help student engagement and exploration. The TI-Nspire Navigator 3.0 makes it easy to evaluate students in engaging ways. It encourages a new means for students to communicate their explanation of the relationship between their mathematical model and an image. This extends their learning beyond the normal rote problem set into an interactive investigation. Today in class I used the last image in this blog entry, the NASA Space Shuttle launch, to see how well students could write an equation of a line. They said they wish their previous math teacher could have used this. It would have helped them learn and understand slope and y-intercept so much better.

Images appear crisp and bright in vivid colors on the TI-Nspire CX. It comes with some images already loaded in the TI-Nspire, Images folder. But it is easy to import more jpeg, bmp, png, or clipboard (YES, copy/paste works) images. Any of these work just as well as the other from my experience. For more info about the file types you can read a recent google group conversation. I really enjoy copy/paste. It has been recommended to not use a several megabyte picture, but to keep the file size small. I've used images on a QuickPolls with the Navigator and it took it a second or two for the students to get the question to pop up on their screen rather than the normal nearly instantaneous delivery. But it was worth it.

So how do you insert a picture or image into a TI-Nspire document? It is essentially and easy and clicking 'Insert.'
From the software, images can be put into Questions, Notes, Graphs, Geometry, and Data & Statistics applications by clicking the 'Insert' button and choose 'Image...'.

Images convert from color into grayscale well on the Touchpad or Clickpad handheld devices.

The screen shots you see can be found in the 3.0 OS TI-Nspire document here.

All text and lines are mapped to black.

Here is an example from Data & Statistics page. Images can be modified by moving them, change the size but keeping the aspect ratio, squish or stretch vertically or horizontally. Again, on a D&S page select the image by pressing menu, Action, Select Image.

So there is currently not a way to rotate an image or adjust the transparency. However, there is a way to make an image more transparent on a Graph and Geometry page with the following trick.

Note page 1.3 looks like the image is more transparent. Actually what happened is the image was inserted on a Geometry page, THEN the view (press menu>View) was changed to Graphing. This puts a somewhat translucent graph on top of the Geometry View. Similarly you could Show an Analytic Window on top of a Geometry page. This is what it looks like on a TI-Nspire Touchpad.

For this OS we do have color, but we are limited to 9 vibrant choices.

If you want to have images as part of a question, especially for doing Activity Center-like questions where equations are put on top of images, instead of doing a split screen, use the question type “Equation.” You can choose y= or f(x)= and change it later under ‘Response Type.’ Check the box for ‘Include a Graph Preview’ in order to make a question that will have some extra ease-of-use features. As the example below demonstrates, the student only needs to start typing in the equation and the graph appears and automatically updates. Again, this works when it is a Quick Poll or if it is part of a document.


Notice the ‘Data View’ options on the bottom right of the Quick Poll. If Graph is chosen, the image appears and students’ contributions are shown when they press enter.
Gray is the default color for students and green is the correct answer. Under the Review Toolbox is a wrench and hammer. By clicking this Tool and choosing Graph Tools, Individualize Student Responses can be activated.

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Another tip in regards to colorful images: Sometimes changing the color of the axes and the line will be beneficial for the students to see their graph. Type something into the y= box and change the attributes and color.

I know the summer workshops will give more hands on experience with images and tips for the use of color. The Connecting Math & Science workshop in Indianapolis (among other places) will also share some updated colorful files to help encourage students toward STEM careers. They will also have colorful 3.0 Nspire files for some NASA activities.