Homework for Meeting #1 (happening October 21st)
Before I start, I wanted to apologize for not having a September meeting. When I picked 3rd Wednesdays, I didn’t realized the September day would be so close to the deadline for project selection. So, our first meeting will be October 21st, and we’ll see if there’s interest in squeezing in another meeting before the November one. Here’s the link to the Meetup entry: https://www.meetup.com/EastHills/events/273606019/?isFirstPublish=true
We’ll be doing a hybrid Creative Math project to start the year: I’ll give you a project or activity to do BEFORE the meeting (or at least wrestle with it), and then we’ll spend our Zoom time talking about what you discovered and any tough parts.
One challenge is that we have a wide range of ages, so I will sometimes have to provide multiple activities so everyone has something they can work on. I’ll let you know if something is more for younger kids or older kids, but in general, I’m going to shoot for things that work for everyone because they have different levels of investigation.
So to start, I have two main activities for everyone.
1. I’m going to start with Exploding Dots, which I introduced last spring during one of our meetings, but this time, we will be using an online version:https://www.explodingdots.org/g/swift-crab-65
I’m registered as a teacher with Global Math, and this is my group link. There’s no need to make an account (unless you want to) and you start with Mechania if you’ve never seen this before, or even if you have (to review). I cannot stress enough that this is a fantastic way to not only learn base math (more on that later), but the levels get surprisingly challenging as you go beyond the first 2-3 levels even if you are doing high school math. I won’t give away too much away, but I’d like you to try to do at least the first two levels before our October meeting.
2. Our second activity is symmetry, and we’ll be doing this over several meetings, so this won’t take too long. I’ve emailed a “Fold, Punch, and Cut” PDF to everyone, and you need to print out the first two pages and do those puzzles. Be sure to bring your squares to the meeting so we can show each other and talk about them.
Here’s the PDF:
That’s it for now! If you have any questions, please email me.
Kris