Tag: starry night

Live Event

Tomorrow, Monday 24 at 20:00, we’ll have the next live event. It will be about Papert’s concept of “syntonic learning”, the inherent differential nature of Papert’s circle, LibreLogo as a physics lab.  As we did last Friday, we’ll open the room at 19:30, so that, while I’m preparing things, you have an additional opportunity to pose questions.

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Linguistic –  not only math

Fabrizio made an interesting remix of the limericks exercise I proposed in lesson 3: in slide 12 you have the original exampl of Papert, in slides 16-21 our LibreLogo example. Fabrizio made a version for writing English limericks – download the code here. Here you have the output of three consecutive runs:

 

Phisics

“aginoudi” asked in Reddit:

I teach physics in a junior high school and I am very much interested to include coding in my teaching practice in order to inspire my pupils. I am looking for ideas!!!

When asked, aginoudi told us that the students are 12-18. For those that are interested in this topic, first of all I suggest to read a very interesting paper by Bruce L. Sherin: “A comparison of programming languages and algebraic notation as expressive languages for physics” (International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning 6: 1–61, 2001).

It is worth the effort to read it because the idea of seeing code and mathematical formulas as different ways to describe the same physical concepts throws a different light on the whole coding issue. Similarly, in the last live event, we showed as in Turtle Geometry geometrical figures are represented by well determined pieces of code, that is, a fragment of code can be true mathematical object.

In the next live event we will discuss how, starting with the simple Papert’s circle that kids may be discover by themselves, we will find ourselves in a Physics lab.

These concepts are exposed in lesson 10. In particular, in slides 16-24 you have some exercises reproducing simple physical problems, at the secondary school level.

Here you can watch the solution for a mass (the Turtle 🙂 ) hanging from a spring. The simulation takes into account also a friction effect (proportional to velocity). In this example we have added an horizontal component so that we get the motion plot with time.