Math is for the Plants 2

Author: Qiaochu (Joy) Xu

Let's see what happened in the last two weeks since we water plant the scraps!

Which plant burgeons first in your small garden?











What shape does lettuce grow into?

What is the earliest evidence of plant growing?

Which plant grow faster than you expected?

Can you graph the growing patterns? 

What do you notice about the growing patterns?

Math is for the Plants 1

Author: Qiaochu (Joy) Xu

It’s always exciting to check out how much the plants grown over a night/week, and I believe it would be so interesting to track and graph their growth! 

Don’t worry if you don’t have a backyard or garden to do this activity, you can either growing little seedings or water plant from kitchen scraps (such as green unions, leeks, carrots and more…) on your windowsill.

What plants do you want to grow...?

Avocado, hot pepper, lemon grass, mushroom, onion, basil, cabbage, potato, pumpkin, carrot greens, celery, cilantro, garlic sprout, ginger... or...you name it?

Here are some vegetables that you could easily grow from kitchen scraps:

Check out here:
19 foods you can grow from scraps

I would recommend lettuces and green onions, as they are easy to get and grow very fast. 

You could follow the steps in the picture, and track their growth within a week, to see:

1) Where do you notice when the growth occurring? 

(2) Do they volume out from inner leaves or grow into a pyramid shape?

(3)  How would you track the growth? 

(4) By taking pictures, making a chart with length they grow and the date, or by drawing it out?

You could start your garden journal, and let's talk about that after a week!!

Test your senses

From Ask a biologist

Vision

The eye is a fascinating and complicated organ that we can learn more about through some simple experiments. Check out the links below to have some fun exploring how your eyes work and why we may not actually see things as clearly as we might like to think!

Peripheral vision

When we see something “out of the corner of our eye”, we mean we are seeing something in our peripheral vision. Peripheral Vision | Science Snacks offers four short videos where you can learn more about peripheral vision and do an experiment to test just how well you can see things that are not directly in front of you.

The Bind Spot

You might have heard about the blind spot before. This is the part of our eye where the optic nerve leaves the eye; this means that there are no photoreceptors there to respond to light. For a quick way to “see” this, check out the image below from Neuroscience for Kids 

“Close your right eye. With your left eye, look at the +. You should see the red dot in your peripheral vision. Keep looking at the + with your left eye. The red dot will move from the left to the right and disappear and reappear as the dot moves into and out of your blind spot.”

There are lots more fun activities related to vision (an our other senses) at the 

Neuroscience for Kids page.

Averted Vision
This is when we purposely use our peripheral vision so that we can see better. 

Well, when it’s dark, looking directly at something doesn’t really work because the photoreceptors in our central vision are of the type that detect color so, if it’s dark, we may not see anything. In our peripheral vision, we use the photoreceptors that pick up black and white which is far better for seeing things in low light conditions. Pilots, hunters, and astronomers all use their peripheral vision to see things at night.

Follow this link for a full explanation: How to See – Averted Vision and Dark Adaptation

Puzzles

Calling all puzzle lovers!

Can we learn while having fun at the same time? YES! In fact, scientists say that having fun while learning is a great idea. And puzzles can be a lot of fun... We'll share some that we love and look forward to seeing the ones you love in your comments!

Many puzzles can be done on paper, not just Sudoku. You can do these puzzles online (from brainbashers.com or others) or printed out (from krazydad.com or others). I prefer to print them out so I can take them with me everywhere and puzzle over them... for hours if need be!

One of my favorites is... solitaire Battleships. Here's one that I've started solving:

Battleship rules:

• Your goal: find all the ships!
• The numbers tell you how many ship pieces there are in that row or column  
• The ships are placed horizontally or vertically, with water between them so that they don't touch (not even diagonally)
• Circle ships are submarines; bullet or diamond shapes are pieces of bigger ships. 

On this example, the ships are shown on
the right side of the puzzle, so you can
cross them off as you locate them.











According to this site, the Battleship puzzle was invented by an Argentinian named Jaime Poniachik in the 1980's. Imagine inventing a puzzle!

Inventing your own puzzle?

You could start by creating your version of a puzzle that already exists... for example, creating your own battleship puzzle. Maybe start from the end: draw a grid with all the ships, water and numbers and then erase more and more until you only have a few clues left... Will your puzzle be easy or hard? Will it have only one possible solution? Are you sure it CAN be solved?

In your own puzzle, you may want to change the rules... What if there are more types of ship? What if they can touch diagonally? What if there's water, ships, and...icebergs?

Maybe your puzzle will have castles instead of ships, or lava instead of water.
The sky's the limit! (Or is it?)

MATH GUY (Bad Guy Parody)

This Winnipeg math teacher is getting a lot of views with his great cover / parody of Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy" - worth a look.

Click here to see the video

More details below below:
Manitoba teachers parody pop songs, create Survivor challenges to engage housebound students
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/parody-video-survivor-winnipeg-covid-19-1.5546788