Math & More

BEAR CARE: This morning the kids (especially Annabelle) were still very enchanted by their bears. Annabelle resumed giving her bear skating lessons, and was pleased with Pinkiepie's progress. "Good job, Bear, you got so much better from yesterday!" she praised.

CJ's bear was sporting fur only, and Annabelle wanted to put its Darth Vader costume back on. It wasn't easy. "Wow, CeeJ, your bear has a rather large ass," remarked Annabelle, trying to squeeze the critter into his vinyl outfit. "C'mon bear. Stop eating so much candycorn," she muttered.
Before long, they were ready to bring their bears to life online, at BuildaBearville.com. They had to enter their bear's ID (from their birth certificates) and create an avatar of themselves. (This morning I was thinking about how many avatars they've already created in their young lives. How the times and technology have changed since I was their age. Or even since Rick and Ken were their age!)

Magically, the Web site knew that the bear CJ was toting around BuildaBearville should be the candycorn one, and that Bee's was a fuzzy pink one. The kids were both amazed. :)

They explored the virtual world a bit. Ive got to say, I'm pleased with how good the kids have become at reading maps thanks to the various online worlds they visit. And while it's hardly classic literature, they are also do a lot of reading when they're exploring these worlds, and learning how to follow directions. All good stuff, in my book.

REBEL, REBEL: Apparently CeeJ and Bee were feeling their oats this morning. They staged a minor rebellion while watching an animated program called "Bo on the Go." Really, it's too preschool-y for them, and they almost never watch it any more.

At one point, Bo (a blue haired computer animated character) told the kids to get up and dance, telling the viewers their dancing would help her accomplish some task.

"I'm not going to dance, are you going to dance?" said Annabelle, looking to CJ.

"No, I'm not going to dance," he agreed.

A few seconds later Bo instructed the kids to get a key to help her unlock a door.

"Get the key yourself," replied CJ.

"Yeah, we've done it many times before, and you already know the instructions," Annabelle added.

At another point Bo asked the kids for help bursting some bubbles.

"We're not going to help Bo, right Annabelle?"

"Right" she agreed.

I'm thinking today was the last morning they watch "Bo on the Go."

LAW OF THE LAND: Today is Constitution Day in the United States. It was on Sept. 17, 1787, that the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy

Not surprisingly, I turned to BrainPOP to help explain the United States Constitution to the MPA student body.

There are somewhere between one and two bazillion online educational resources related to the Constitution. I could have spent years looking at all of them. In the hour I did spend, I believe a couple of leading ones to be the National Constitution Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And Virginia is home to the Papers of George Washington, a super cool resource that even allows you to see GW's edits to a draft of the Federal Constitution.

MATH MINDED: We had math on our minds today. Thanks to the Seattle Homeschool Group's email list, I learned about a great local resource, Math for Love. It was founded by Dan Finkel, who earned a PhD in mathematics at UW. Rather than become a collegiate math professor, he to reach out to a different audience. He says his goal "is to give everyone the chance to fall in love with mathematics," and so he maintains a blog, tutors, holds math circles and salons. The salons are what I'm most interested in. He describes it as "an opportunity for everyone–children, adults, families, teachers–to come together and play with math. We’ll have different mathematical games, puzzles, books, and inspirations available." He's hosting a salon a couple of weeks from now at a big coffeehouse in Wallingford. I hope we can drop by.

By poking around Finkel's Web site, I discovered Math Playgrounds, a great Web site with lots of math games. It was established in 2002, by math teacher Colleen King, for students in her class. Math topics covered include problem solving, mathematical art and real world math.

CJ found a game called Mathman, inspired by Pacman. In it, he had to first eat a question mark and then go hunt down and eat the ghost that had the right answer. This arcade style game introduced the kids to the fact that in an equation with mixed operators, the division and multiplication symbols must be dealt with take precedence over subtraction and addition signs.
http://www.mathplayground.com/mathman.html

Annabelle played a couple of cool games. One was an online version of Battleship (which involves making predictions and using logic). She also played a SUPER cool online Spirograph game. As the game creator explains, varying radii produces beautiful epicycloids. It really is so much fun - you should give it a try!

BOOKISH: The kids spent a few minutes filling out the balance of their Seattle Pubic Library Summer Reading Program charts. We were hoping to turn them in and claim their prize today, but the Magnolia Library wasn't open when we stopped by. Bummer.

BREAKING THE CODE: As of today, CJ is now the proud owner of a nifty little tool to help him hack into his Nintendo DS games. It's called the Action Replay for Nintendo DS. You slide your DS game into its port and then the Action Replay slides into the slot where the game normally goes. It allows you to enter codes that lets you play your games in ways not otherwise possible (for instance opening advanced levels, giving you infinite lives, changing backgrounds or characters' appearances, etc.).

CJ tried half a dozen codes he gleaned from the manufacturer's Web site before declaring he wanted to make his own codes. I told him I thought that was cool, but that he needed to be careful. When you start messing with a program's codes, bad things could happen.

I managed to find an article online that explained how people actually make hack codes like CJ was pining to do. Tonight, CJ and Christian read the story together. It explained that one way to make codes was by getting the game to glitch and then navigating to the built in debugging menu. From there, you can glean some of the codes used in the game and use those to make combos that mix things up.

In other programming news, yesterday I learned about Scratch, "a programming language for everyone" from the "Lifelong Kindergarten Group" at MIT. According to their "about, Scratch is "a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web." I think you'll be hearing a lot more about Scratch in the days, weeks and months to come ...