Day 4

Shodor Main Image Text that says the Shodor Foundation

To start off the Math Explorations Class, Chris Novotny introduced himself and informed the class they would be working with STELLA. He informed the students they would be modeling an epidemic, and when they were asked, the students defined it. The students then went outside to do an activity about probability and the beginning of an epidemic. The students all had a ball with the activity, but only one person 'survived' the epidemic. The students then came in and began working on STELLA. First the students designed what the model should be, and then they got on the computers and built it. In the students' first basic model, there were only two different types of people, sick and not sick. The students ran this simple model, and everyone got sick, nobody stayed well. The students figured out that after a while people got better. Thus they added a group of people that were recovered. With these settings everyone got sick, then they all get better eventually. Then students experimented with changing the recovery and infection rate.

Maria took over next, and she began to teach them geometry. The students did an online activity by following the link to the Koch Curve. After experimenting with this for a while, the students wondered what this had to do with geometry. Maria explained that the outside of the Koch Curve could be infinite distance containing a finite amount of space. Maria then gave more examples of infinities in geometry.

After the break, the students came in and began examining the Sierpinski Triangle. This tied in with many math concepts, but the first model they looked at had nothing to do with probability. Another link off the link above did relate probability back to the Sierpinski triangle and therefore geometry. This applet drew in the Sierpinski Triangle by drawing random dots.

After this, the students began learning geometry with manipulatives. They studied conic sections using styrofoam and waxed paper. The students discovered that parabolas appear many places it wouldn't seem likely that they would. You can see another online activity the students visited.