Random thoughs from a random fellow

Just spotted an excellent video of statistics of many world data sets like GDP and child mortality. Its done in humorous way by  Hans Rosling a Swedish professor of international relations. His dream is for publicly funded data-sets to me made available to the general public in a visually compelling way and he has succeeded in spades. You can see the program in action on googles site (they just brought the company).

It just so happens that this sort of thing has been on my todo list for a few years now: a program to draw data from any online source using a combination of screen-scrapping programs, a libary of known datasets and a visual front end. Ah well someone beet me to it.

Making a set of Napier’s bones is a great activity. Napiers Bones are a set of sticks with the multiplication tables written on them. The sticks can be placed together to allow the higher tables to be calculated, for example the 23 times table. Lots of paractice with multiplication is involved in making the bones and they can be used as a step towards teacking long multiplication.

One mathematics activity I’ve tried a number of time which seems to work sucessfully is measuring a table or desk. Use a 30cm ruler so there is some element of repeated addition to find the full length. From this other activities can be tried finding the circumferance and area and for more advanced students pythagorus’s can be used to find the diagonal which again can be checked by measuring.