Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Superhero of Math

I've always wanted to be a superhero. Now my dream has come true.
I just received word that I won the Math Hero Award. da-ta-da-daa

My family surprised me when I got home from work. There are some funny video clips of this on my wife's blog.

The purpose of the award, with its $2500 and $2500 matching grant for the school, is to "reward and celebrate teachers and tutors for promoting math achievement to students in a fun and challenging learning environment. "
(The picture to the right is me presenting the check to Principal Brian Hudson.)

This Thanksgiving my family and school have even more to be thankful about. I'm grateful for Raytheon and the work they are doing to promote STEM initiatives. I found a video that explains some of their motivation for having this award.

Raytheon has a great website for encouraging mathematics for the middle grades, MathMovesU.com

If you know another Math Hero, nominate them next year.

Now if I can just get a cape like my kiddies were wearing when we visited the Children's Museum. I searched the internet to no avail.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Pie Chart - Thanksgiving

My 11 year old daughter is making a Thanksgiving Newspaper. To fill an empty spot on the paper she came up with the idea of polling the family on what their favorite pie is. Since we have 9 people in the family I gave her a tip on dividing a circle 9 ways to make a pie chart. She came back a little later and reported the results. I was interested that the first 4 digits of pi were represented 3.14159..
My 12 year old recently received a TI-Nspire CAS for her birthday. She was delighted to see how easy it was to make a pie chart on the Nspire. She loved the dynamic nature of the Data & Statistics application, i.e. the moving dots are really cool.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, our family's annual Thanksgiving letter is available on my wife's blog.

If you are interested, several years ago I did a study of every time the word "thanks", "gratitude" and its variations were used in the Bible. I called this study Biblical Thanksgiving, and it can be found here.

So what is your favorite pie to have for Thanksgiving?
If you looked at the Biblical Thanksgiving study, which verse or observation did you particularly like?