Lacky Band Learning Machines




I was often told to leave my calculator outside during maths classes - especially during exams. But I don't recall a prohibition on elastic bands. Over the next 6 months, as @TheScienceNomad I will be getting the chance to travel extensively across South East Asia. Working with Teachers, science centres, and training universities. A strong focus of these workshops will be on hands on, curiosity driven, enquiry learning. Science, natural phenomena, spatial reasoning, maths, logic, creativity, design, problem solving, and computational thinking will all get a run. The more I get time to think about these "different topics" the more the processes of equipping people to lead their own learning into them, converge.

I'm rediscovering my love of geometry, and structure and logic, and rushing now to develop some extra activities to put into the backpack before I go.

The Humble Peg Board, rolled off my shop floor this evening. Its Dental Floss friendly, and can be used for exploring minimal spanning networks ( I think), Colour map problems,  Area and Perimeter interactions, and this great one, a technique for dismantling a complex poly, so you can work out its area. And we all know, in these troubled times, you don't know when you might need to dismantle a Complex Poly.




With a few pegs and a LACKY BAND  a complex but otherwise charming polygon can be created. But its area? How to find that?

We can guess, estimate, grab a set of trig tables, or USE MORE ELASTIC.



OR use some logic. If we recognize that the complex yellow poly must have an area equal to the large pink poly minus the area of the irregular poly in the lower section, THEN.. we only have TWO COMPLEX POLYs to work on...Not going well so far.....  MORE ELASTIC and logic So we can use some elastic bands to dissect the big poly into 3 simpler ones, with some averaging of the points at the top, are really just rectangles with a bias to the right or left.

So if we work out those areas... and add
MORE ELASTIC..
 We can create yet MORE simple polys, which we can get a grip on.

This is just one of the nice explorations, I'm rediscovering. Even without doing a single SUM, or SUBTRACTION , the PROCESS of breaking this problem down, of intersections, of THIS BUT NOT THAT logic is a great introduction.

I may pass my exams this time.

Stay tuned.

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