
Hot dog eating; Flag art; Fireworks on your calculator; Creating a 5-pointed star with one cut; and a possible new, 52-star flag.
Artistic way to encourage understanding of a conic section. Participants physically build an ellipse by choosing two foci and sketching the figure through a loop of string. While stitching an elliptical string design they puzzle about varying the foci spread and the loop length to create more extreme ellipses and are intuitively introduced to the measurement of eccentricity.