Sunday, April 10, 2011

Geometry Magazine Assignment

I am going to have my honors Geometry kids make a single-issue Geometry magazine! I decided that of all the new things I want to try out during the rest of this year, this project is going to be The One that's my baby. I'm doing it with the honors kids for two reasons: 1. There aren't that many of them and they are all reasonably motivated, so it's going to make logistics management easier for me, 2. I would love for my regular kids to do the same, except I think there'd be so much overlap in content that, realistically, the readers are not going to want to read through so many math articles at once.

Here is the instruction file I've pulled together. I am going to give it to the kids this week so that they can start thinking about it over Spring Break. (Some of the extra motivated ones might even try to do the whole thing over Spring Break.) I estimate that it'll take about 3 to 4 weeks outside of class for us to pull this thing together. (Along the way I'll give them a little bit of class time here and there to work on it together as I see fit.)

I'm excited! I'm hoping these kids will do a good job, so that they can be my ambassadors of math love to the rest of campus. :) The way I envision it, every article would contain a brief break down of what we had learned in class related to the concept, and then go into an extension part -- either a historical connection (ie. life of Pythagoras or how people used triangulation to find the distance of X star or Y planet), or a modern connection to what cutting-edge technology now uses that Geometry concept (ie. GPSs or medical analysis of cancer as relating to fractals). You know - something a little bit beyond the classroom!

Wish me luck!!

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