Archive for childern_9_to12
June 14, 2007 at 11:51 am · Filed under astronomy, children_6_to_9, childern_9_to12, ramesh
We have all seen the moon and its phases many many times. Now imagine trying to figure out answers to questions like: What time does a full moon rise/set: mental imagery might just work here. On your way to work two hours after sunrise, you find the moon rising: what phase is the moon in? Gets a little harder. Next, if the moon is rising during sunset, where will it rise a week later!!!
This beautifully done simulation allows you to answer these what-ifs with surprising ease. Just drag the moon around and use a little imagination. No amount of drawing on the blackboard can convey so much so fast.
Imagine also bringing in the fact that the moon’s plane of revolution around the earth and the earth’s plane of revolution around the sun are at a slight inclination to each other and so we don’t get an eclipse every month..
June 12, 2007 at 12:08 pm · Filed under programming, children_12_to_15, childern_9_to12, ramesh
Scratch from the MIT media lab is a neat workbench to create interactive movies via visual programming. You can create cartoons and associate a program with each cartoon. This program is not written but assembled form visual blocks (here is an example).
The program specifies how the cartoon moves around, how large it is, how it looks, what sounds and callouts it puts out etc. Loops allow this code to run forever and conditions allow variation over time/space (so you could say turn back on hitting the edge). You can even define your own variables, assign values, do numeric and boolean comparisons etc, so this is a full programming language represented visually.
Scratch is intended as a first (and friendly) introduction to programming. Children who have no idea what the blocks mean can try to fit them together (the block shapes ensure that if the blocks fit and there are no intervening voids then the program is valid) and see their effect on their cartoon. I will need to watch a few children take this on to see how well it works. But sounds like a great idea, good for building your own interactive games as well. I do wish though that the media labs folks had built it on the web as a flash/javascript program rather than use a client, it should be easy to just do this whole thing in flash.
Scratch does leave you wondering why all of professional programming should not move to this mode (easy to read programs, no typos etc, and a lot of pleasant colour, this is a tantalizing thought, maybe some day).
June 11, 2007 at 9:21 am · Filed under childern_9_to12, algebra, maths, vinay
We will start with pythagoras theorem:
I also want to try some inline variables 
to see how this appears. We have to write some long sentences to see how they wrap.
This is how we draw a triangle.
Let me now try to embed flash:
[flash http://www.houseofalgorithms.org/gof/ramesh/flash/subtraction/myproject.swf]