On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 12:02 PM, kirby urner <kirby.ur...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Maria Droujkova <droujk...@gmail.com> wrote: > > << SNIP >> > >> That's why I am looking for kid-friendly AND large communities of >> practice first and foremost for any educational endeavors... >> >> >> >> -- >> Cheers, >> MariaD >
Exclusivity should be an interesting angle to pursue, with that "Hogwarts" metaphor. Still, math is already such an uphill battle socially that going for even smaller communities, on top of small interest in math, may be exponentially hard. Both approaches should be tried, though. > > In any case, remember that teachers, not just students, like that > feeling of being in a small pilot or government study, elite guinea > pigs, something to brag about, kind of like TAG. That's where I like > talking about the Winterhaven Experiment (see slides) where Silicon > Forest executives had total control of our "geek Hogwarts", were able > to boot Google Earth the first day, go from there to Kml to Xml to GIS > more generally, as a set of rich data structures on a polyhedron > (planet Earth), ergo we're talking geography (GIS) not just geometry, > etc. Bridging geometry and geography is a fond goal of ours. I just got back from a nice workshop about Math Circles and Math Clubs (Twitter hashtag #greatcircles though almost nobody joined me in reporting it on Twitter http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23greatcircles) - there was a very nice presentation there by Tom Davis (a pdf on his page is related http://www.geometer.org/mathcircles/) on geography and geometry. Questions like, "Where do you need to stand on Venus for the sun to be directly overhead?" Then I asked him about designing your own planet systems, which can be a good programming task, I think >_> -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig