Tag: patterns

Hurricanes again …

Updated In this updated hurricane activity, we’ve ask students to examine the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale and consider what other elements besides this ranking may contribute to the devastation that is caused by tropical storms. Students read about hurricane classfications…

Memorial Day 2023

Who are we honoring?  How did the holiday come about?  Isn’t Memorial Day usually on May 30th?
Students learn a little about the history of the holiday, analyze the possibilities and patterns for when it is celebrated and make observations about the incredible numbers of deaths that have been caused by war.

Lunar New Year 2023

A combination of 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches, the year’s symbol creates a sequence of year names that eventually repeat. Students explore the least common multiple of these two cycles without ever hearing the term LCM.

Beautiful mathematics

Color, measure, design, Sierpinski, spirals, Pythagorean triples, hexadecimal color codes, fractals, string design, modular math, Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci, polyhedra, build an eclipse … Enjoy!

Wind chill

Students use the National Weather Service’s chart to look for patterns, make predictions, decide how many ways the wind-chill could be -22 degrees F, and compare the formula’s outcome with their chart predications.

Labor Day 2022

What is this holiday about?  Are we celebrating the start of school?  New cars? The end of summer? In this short activity, students learn about the intended meaning of Labor Day as they read about its origin. For the mathematical…

Hexadecimal coloring

Probably most of us have heard of and even used hexadecimal color codes. Don’t you wonder why their number descriptions really make sense? In this activity we first ask students to color in our Golden Spiral by giving them the…

Hanukkah is almost here! – updated

Updated 2022! Hanukkah begins on Sunday, December 18th this year. Why is the date always different? Students look at the Hebrew calendar and appreciate the incredible mathematics involved in creating a calendar that aligns both the moon’s revolution about the…

Tree for Springtime

What is happening here?

Here in the Northeast, flowers are blooming and trees are leafing out. We thought the creation of a tree that grows before your eyes might be akin to what is going on all around us. What do you see that…

Will our U.S. flag change yet again?

How many stripes are in our present flag pictured above?  (The bottom right flag that has been in use since 1960.) How many stars? What do the numbers of stars and stripes represent? U.S. Congress is again considering whether to…

At least the days are getting longer

What’s your guess?  How fast are the number of daylight hours changing each day?  Are the changes dramatic or subtle? Students make guesses; compute how long, on average, the change in daylight hours should be; and finally understand the variability in our year of daylight hours.

Inauguration Date

The date of the Presidential Inauguration this year can be written in an interesting way. What do you notice?  What do you wonder?  Do you think that this happens often in a year?