mathfest

Apple bites

2012-01-22T04:34:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that after watching Apple's iBooks Author video, I was trying to figure out how to get an OS 10.7 computer to download the authoring application and an iPad to test the results and imagining authoring all kinds of marvelous content but then I got to thinking...

you mean I can't view my publication on any computer, even a Mac?
you mean that if I want to sell my publication, it has to be through Apple's store?
you mean that Apple wants to be the sole provider of textbook delivery?

Now I am thinking that it is almost a moral imperative to take a pass.

Having an easy application to create digital materials is a wonderful idea. Forcing those materials to live in a proprietary format, available for sale in an exclusive Apple store is not. Isn't that what Steve Jobs said he didn't like about Flash?

I guess I agree with dougpete (with thanks for the links).

Trying out Trello

2012-01-19T06:27:00.000-08:00

A real nugget came through by Google Reader from Joel on Software - the guy behind the Joel Test of how good a software team is (mathclips.ca gets at most 3/12 on it, BTW). His company, Fog Creek Software, produces Trello, an online collaboration tool, that is currently free.

The CLIPS team has been trying it out for a couple of weeks and I think it is really promising. The notification history provides a progress log. You can create multiple checklists and easily monitor progress and you can send notifications to specific members of the team. You can see how the Trello team uses it, by going to their development board, likely after you have signed up. Best of all, it feels like the value of using it exceeds the effort of maintaining it.

I expect that my massive following (100 readers according to Google Reader) will flood their servers to the breaking point moments after I press the Publish button since no one I have mentioned it to has heard about it. Here is their announcement video which is a good introduction:

AS2 Farming out compile work to a swf

2012-01-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Crystal's vivid imagination, the CLIPS team has created a Hops on Lines Tool that consists of 27 .as files averaging 25K or so. When compiled, the .swf is about 700K. When an activity uses the Hops Tool as well as other classes, the compile can be very slow or can max out available memory and fail. We decided to farm out the job of compiling to another .swf and load it into any activities that require it.

Unfortunately, this means that the activity.swf cannot be run standalone. Users will either have to be online, so that the Hops .swf can be found at mathclips.ca, or they will have to save the Hops .swf to a predictable location on their hard drive.

Originally, an instance of the Hops tool was created using a call to a static create method as described in a previous post.

     HopsOnLines.create(target, "instanceName", initObj);

To farm out this work and keep all the current code backwards compatible, we rename HopsOnLines to be OriginalHopsOnLines and make the new HopsOnLines.as contain:

class HopsOnLines extends MovieClip {

 public static function init(myCreatorReference:MovieClip){
  _root.theToolCreator = myCreatorReference;
 }

 public static function create(container:MovieClip, instanceName:String, initObj:Object, depth) {
  return _root.theToolCreator.create(container, instanceName, initObj, depth);
 }
}

In order to use this new version of the class, an initialization step must be performed to tell the class where the movieclip containing the compiled swf is.
The .fla used to create the .swf contains:

System.security.allowDomain("*");
import HopsOnLinesOld;
stop();

function create(target:MovieClip, toolName:String, initObject:Object, depth:Number){
 return HopsOnLinesOld.create(target, toolName, initObject, depth);
}

In this way, the .fla compiles the HopsOnLinesOld, with all its imported classes and exposes a create method that simply shuttles the job to the legacy creator. This is one of the few times when the .fla is many times smaller than the compiled .swf.

In order to use this compiled swf. An activity must load it into a movieclip. When it is completed, call init to tell it where that movieclip is, and then any HopsOnLines.create statements will work without any modifications. Here is some sample code from an activity .fla:

import HopsOnLines.as;
System.security.allowDomain("*");

var testingLoader:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
var testingListener:Object = new Object();

testingListener._parent = this;
testingLoader.addListener(testingListener);

this.createEmptyMovieClip("testingContainer", this.getNextHighestDepth());
this.createEmptyMovieClip("testingLooper", this.getNextHighestDepth());

testingLoader.loadClip("http://www.myDomain.ca/HopsOnLinesCreator.swf", this.testingContainer);

testingListener.onLoadInit = function(which){
 trace("onLoadInit with "+which);
 this._parent.testingContainer.init(this._parent.testingContainer);
 this._parent.testingContainer.create(this._parent, "myHops_mc", {_x:50, _y:50});
 if (this._parent.myHops_mc == undefined){
  trace("onLoadInit has an error not picked up by onLoadError");
 }
}

There are a couple of things that I still wonder about. I get incompatible context errors related to security and sometimes they seem to make it not work. Also, if the file does not exist, onLoadInit seems to be called rather that onLoadError. Also, I seemed to have the make the reference in the new .as file to _root - I had tried a static property and a _global but that did not work as well, I am not sure why.

Improving MovieClipProxy.as?

2011-10-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

This is the fifth post in a series. I made a couple of "improvements" to MovieClipProxy.as and found out a thing or two before abandoning the idea due to our sloppy coding practices that would require more fixing than I was prepared to do.

I was also happy to receive a reply from Senocular indicating that there was not a simpler way just to override the _visible setter. He wrote:

AS3 supports native implementation overrides for getter/setters, but not AS1/AS2

In the last post, I left off wondering whether I was willing to write a getter/setter for all the properties, methods and functions of my ubPod class.

I wrote two functions for MovieClipProxy.as to add additional properties and functions to a MovieClipProxy instance, namely addProp and addFunction:

public function addProp(propName:String){
 var getterFunction:Function = function(){
  return this._mc[arguments.callee.name];
 }
 getterFunction.name = propName;
 var setterFunction:Function = function(newVal):Void{
  this._mc[arguments.callee.name] = newVal;
 }
 setterFunction.name = propName;

 this.addProperty(propName, getterFunction, setterFunction);
}
public function addFunction(propName:String){
 this[propName] = function(a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j){
  return this._mc[arguments.callee.name].call(arguments.callee.mcp_instance, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j);
 }
 this[propName].name = propName;
 this[propName].mcp_instance = this._mc;

 //no luck getting getters and setters to work for functions
    /*
 var getterFunction:Function = function(){
  trace("in mcp getter function with name "+arguments.callee["name"]+" from "+arguments.callee);
  trace("addFunction getter");
  return this._mc[arguments.callee.name];
 }
 getterFunction.name = propName;
 var setterFunction:Function = function(f:Function){
  trace("in mcp setter function with name "+arguments.callee["name"]+" from "+arguments.callee);
  trace("addFunction setter");
  //this._mc[arguments.callee.name] = newVal;
  this._mc[arguments.callee.name] = function(a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j){return f.call(arguments.callee.mcp_instance, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j)};
 }
 setterFunction.name = propName;
 setterFunction.mcp_instance = this._mc;

 this.addProperty(propName, getterFunction, setterFunction);
 */
}

which are invoked pretty simply with code like:

mcp.addProp("side");
mcp.addFunction("scale");

Next, I wondered if there was a way to get my ubPod class to reveal more of its properties and methods in a for..in loop. The new learning here relates to ASSetPropFlags (of which the compiler is unaware) which allowed me to write a function like:

_global["ASSetPropFlags"](ubPod.prototype,null,6,true);

for (var i in ubPod.prototype){    
    var thing = ubPod.prototype[i];
    var typeThing:String = typeof(thing)
    if (typeThing == "function" && i != "__constructor__"){
        mcp.addFunction(i);
    } else if (typeThing == 'number' || typeThing == 'string' || typeThing == 'boolean' || (typeThing == 'object' && i != "__proto__")){
        mcp.addProp(i);
    } else {
        trace("did nothing for "+i);
    }
}

Maybe some of this will help folks still in AS2 land. I am left still pretty foggy about __proto__, prototype, extends and casting.

Here are two challenges:

Find the error in the code shared in the previous post.
Modify my addFunction method to allow for a getter and setter as well as a function definition to be established.

Actionscript 2: Catching when an instance of a Class that extends MovieClip is made visible

2011-10-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

You just don't get blog post titles as precise as that every day!

I have been telling a story today about trying to catch when a movieclip's _visible property is set. First, I showed how we create classes that extend MovieClip. Next, I described the problems that I am having writing a set and get function for _visible. Third, I showed how MovieClipProxy could be used on a simple MovieClip to catch the setting of _visible. Now, I am going to finish the story and show how it can be done for a class like ubSquare.

The first step is to make a slight adjustment to MovieClipProxy. Its constructor is written to either take 3 parameters and create an empty MovieClip or 4 parameters and attach a movieclip from the library. I changed it so that if it is sent more, it will use the first parameter to create the movieclip.

In the first post's example, we created the ubSquare using:

this.mySquare_ubS = ubSquare.create(this, "mySquare_mc", {_x:50, _y:75, _side:10});

So if we change the constructor of MovieClipProxy to read:

 function MovieClipProxy(a,b,c,d,e) {
  var mc, mc2;
  if (arguments.length == 3) {
   mc = __initEmpty(a,b,c);
  } else if (arguments.length == 4){
   mc = __initAttached(a,b,c,d);
  } else {
   mc = a(b,c,d,e);
  }
  __applyPrototyped(mc);
 }

Then we can invoke it with:

 var mcp:MovieClipProxy = new MovieClipProxy(ubSquare.create, container, instanceName, initObj, depth);

and the created MovieClip will now be a ubSquare.

But, ubSquare had a side property and a scale method that are not handled by MovieClipProxy. I can create a ubSquareProxy Class

import edu.clips.test.MovieClipProxy;
import edu.clips.test.ubSquare;

class edu.clips.test.ubSquareProxy extends MovieClipProxy {
 
 public static function create(container:MovieClip, instanceName:String,
         initObj:Object, depth:Number) {
  if (depth == undefined) depth = container.getNextHighestDepth();
  var mcp:MovieClipProxy = new MovieClipProxy(ubSquare.create, container, instanceName, initObj, depth);

  //define all the ubSquare properties, methods and functions
  mcp["scale"] = function(newScale:Number){
   trace("in ubSquareProxy.scale "+ mcp._mc);
   mcp._mc.scale(newScale);
  }
  mcp.addProperty("side", 
      function(){trace("addProperty getter");return this._mc.side}, 
      function(newSide){trace("addProperty setter");this._mc.side = newSide});
  return mcp;
 }
}

and create it using:

this.mySquare_ubS = ubSquareProxy.create(this, "mySquare_mc", {_x:50, _y:75, _side:10});

Now the questions that I am left with are these:

Is it worth the time to apply this method to my ubPod class with 80 documented properties, 23 methods and 7 event handlers just to capture when the one MovieClip property, _visible, changes?
Is there a way to use __proto__ or prototype or constructor to access the MovieClip's setter for _visible and just change that to broadcast an event?
Should ubSquareProxy extend MovieClipProxy, MovieClip or nothing?

Actionscript 2: One Way to catch when a MovieClip becomes visible

2011-10-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I outlined the difficulties that I have been having reacting to when a MovieClip becomes visible. I think the big reason for these difficulties is that _visible is a MovieClip property that is impossible to override with getters and setters.

However, I happened to be trolling around Senocular's site and found his MovieClipProxy class. This class creates an object with all of the standard MovieClip properties with getter and setter functions and all the standard MovieClip methods together with the standard functions, like onEnterFrame, envoked using the call statement and the correct scope.

If I change the setter and getter for _visible as follows:

 function get _visible():Boolean {
  trace("get _visible");
  return _mc._visible; 
 }
 function set _visible(v:Boolean):Void {
  trace("set _visible");
  this._xscale *=2;
  _mc._visible = v; 
 }

Note that I am just setting the _xscale when _visible is set just for a double visual confirmation.

If you create a new Actionscript 2 .fla tester file with the code:

import edu.clips.test.MovieClipProxy;

var mcp:MovieClipProxy = 
 new MovieClipProxy(this, "test", 1);

trace("_xscale before first set _visible "+mcp._xscale);
mcp._visible = false;

mcp.clear();
mcp.lineStyle(2, 0x0000FF, 100, true);
mcp.moveTo(0, 0);
mcp.lineTo(200, 100);

trace("_xscale before second set _visible "+mcp._xscale);
mcp._visible = false;
trace("_xscale after second _visible "+mcp._xscale);

this.test._visible = true;
trace("_xscale after movieClip set _visible "+mcp._xscale);
trace("or "+this.test._xscale);

and test it, you get the output:

_xscale before first set _visible 100
set _visible
get _visible
_xscale before second set _visible 200
set _visible
get _visible
_xscale after second _visible 400
_xscale after movieClip set _visible 400
or 400

When you reference the MovieClipProxy object mcp, the setters and getters are used and applied to the MovieClip this.test. When you reference this.test._visible directly, the setter is not used.

Now you are in the position to capturing the setting of _visible and do something more sensible than upscaling, as long as you create a MovieClipProxy and reference it.

This still leaves the question of whether this approach can be bolted on to the method we are using to create Classes that extend MovieClip.

Actionscript 2: Trouble overriding setter for MovieClip Properties like _visible

2011-10-24T05:44:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I described how we create classes to extend MovieClip.

Continuing with the ubSquare example, now let's suppose that I want to scale my square whenever it becomes visible. Well, _visible is a property of the class, just like side was so how about adding some code like:

//at the top with _side
private var __visible:Boolean = true;

//with the side getter and setters
public function get _visible():Boolean{
 trace("in ubSquare get _visible");
 return this.__visible;
}
public function set _visible(newVis:Boolean):Void{
 trace("in ubSquare set _visible");
 this.__visible = newVis;
 this._visible = newVis;
}

This is just like what I did for side, except that I can't just change my private __visible property and expect the movieclip to change, so I add the last line to tell the movieclip to actually change its visibility.

There are two problems with this:

If I put a line like:
this.mySquare_ubS._visible = false;
in my tester, the set function is not called.
If I put a line like
this._visible = true;
in my scale method, I get 256 levels of recursion since the set for _visible calls itself.

One way to fix the second problem is to change the last line of the set _visible function from:
this._visible = newVis;
to
setProperty(this, _visible, newVis);

The output becomes:

scale making movieclip visible true
in ubSquare set _visible
in ubSquare get _visible

This, of course, begs three questions:

what is the point of writing a setter for _visible if it can be avoided by using a (deprecated) setProperty operation?
why is a get _visible call made when I set _visible? The line in the scale method (this._visible = true) calls both the setter and the getter. I was sure I had a good link that explained why but cannot for the life of me find it now.
how do I solve the first problem which was the important one? I want to be able to notice when anything makes my square visible, not just when some of my own class code does.

I have figured out one way to catch the setting of _visible for a MovieClip, which I will blog about next, but have yet to figure out how to apply it to a Class that extends MovieClip.

Actionscript 2: Extending MovieClip class without using a Library Object

2011-10-24T04:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wouter Verweirder, we are creating all of our classes for the CLIPS project without requiring library objects.

The following is a short example of a class that creates a red square, the size and scale of which can be changed. The size is changed either through the private property _side or the virtual public property, side. The scale is changed by a public method, scale().

/**This class creates a square on the stage.
It is purely illustrative.  

*/

class edu.clips.test.ubSquare extends MovieClip {
 //used to register this class as though it was in the Library
 static var symbolName:String = "__Packages.edu.clips.test.ubSquare";
 static var symbolOwner:Function = ubSquare;
 static var symbolLinked = Object.registerClass(symbolName, symbolOwner);

 /**the length of each side, in pixels.  Default: 20 */
 private var _side:Number = 20;
 
 public static function create(container:MovieClip, instanceName:String,
         initObj:Object, depth:Number) {
  if (depth == undefined) depth = container.getNextHighestDepth();
  trace("attaching ubSquare using the manufactured symbolName");
  container.attachMovie(symbolName, instanceName, depth, initObj);
  trace("casting MovieClip as ubSquare");
  //this avoids compiler errors in other classes involving ubSquare
  return ubSquare(container[instanceName]);
 }

 function ubSquare() {
  trace("in ubSquare");
  this.constructor = ubSquare;
  this.constructor.name = "ubSquare";
  this.drawSquare();
 }
 public function onLoad():Void {
  trace("ubSquare loaded");
 }
 public function get side():Number{
  trace("in ubSquare get side");
  return this._side;
 }
 public function set side(newSide):Void{
  trace("in ubSquare set side");
  var numSide:Number = parseInt(newSide, 10);
  if (!isNaN(numSide)){
   this._side = newSide;
   this.drawSquare();
  }
 }
 public function scale(newScale:Number){
  //this will use set side
  this.side *= newScale;
 }

 private function drawSquare():Void {
  //this won't use the set and get functions, since _side is used
  trace("in drawSquare");
  this.clear();
  this.lineStyle(2, 0xFF0000, 100, true);
  this.moveTo(0, 0);
  this.lineTo(0, this._side);
  this.lineTo(this._side, this._side);
  this.lineTo(this._side, 0);
  this.lineTo(0, 0);
  trace("finished drawSquare");
 }
}

and here is the code in the first frame of a new actionscript 2 .fla that uses it. Note that you have to save the class in a path ending with edu/clips/test/ubSquare.as and set your Actionscript preferences to be able to find it.

import edu.clips.test.ubSquare;

this.mySquare_ubS = ubSquare.create(this, "mySquare_mc", {_x:50, _y:75, _side:10});

trace("tester settting virtual property side");
this.mySquare_ubS.side = 40;

trace("tester calling public function scale");
this.mySquare_ubS.scale(3);

trace("the side ends up being: ");
trace(this.mySquare_ubS.side);

Here is the output:

attaching ubSquare using the manufactured symbolName
in ubSquare
in drawSquare
finished drawSquare
casting MovieClip as ubSquare
tester settting virtual property side
in ubSquare set side
in drawSquare
finished drawSquare
in ubSquare get side
tester calling public function scale
in ubSquare get side
in ubSquare set side
in drawSquare
finished drawSquare
in ubSquare get side
the side ends up being: 
in ubSquare get side
120
ubSquare loaded

In most of our stuff, we don't use setters and getters at all. We initialize the properties by passing them in the third parameter of create, as I did to initially set the side to 10 px (see Paul's post). We change properties using a setProp method that would look something like:

public function setProp(prop:String, val, doDraw:Boolean):Void {
 if (doDraw == undefined) doDraw = true;
 this[prop] = val;
 if (doDraw) this.drawSquare();
}

Senocular's FAQs were also very useful when we were trying to figure out how to extend the MovieClip class.

A video that kinda works the day after an election...

2011-10-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

I still love this.Dedicated to all the swing voters out there.

Handyman Homage

2011-10-05T07:55:00.000-07:00

My Buddy Doug

2011-10-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

Although, I am a little behind in my reading of Doug Peterson's blog, he always has fascinating links and articles to dig into. Yesterday, it was the Dolphin Mobile browser and a post about Blogger Mobile layouts. The latter had me blow away the widgets on this blog for a few minutes until I found the revert button.

Today, was a fun diversion that appealed to my vanity. When we were growing up, we thought we were the only Iseneggers in the new world, but the internet and Nadine cured that notion.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are

or fewer people with the name Ross Isenegger in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Doug is so current that he has dropped Mathfest off his blogroll, presumably for my dismal rate of posting.

More trivia from HowManyOfMe.com:

There are 78,058 people in the U.S. with the first name Ross.
Statistically the 622nd most popular first name.
More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Ross are male.
There are fewer than 116 people in the U.S. with the last name Isenegger.

Flash reverts MovieClips to Original Negative Depth when moving to a Previous Frame

2011-09-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

I have been working with Flash for over six years and there are still things that surprise me about Actionscript 2 - surprise but not delight! This week, I was trying to create a new layer in between two existing ones on the stage, using code only. I figured that I could create a new MovieClip and swapDepths to put it in the correct location. Everything worked great except that my created MovieClip would disappear as I navigated to a previous frame.

It bothered me so much, that I created a very simple tester of the problem. It has an actions layer and one layer with a thick red line drawn on it. It has a text box that reports which of the four frames you are on. It has a green button which goes to the next frame and a red button which goes to the previous frame.

On the first frame, I create an empty MovieClip with code, swap its depth with the stage MovieClip and draw a blue line on it. Everything looks great as you go from Frame 1 to 2 to 3 to 4, but go back from Frame 3 to Frame 2 or from Frame 4 to Frame 3 and the blue line disappears. If you trace the depth of the stage MovieClip, you see that Flash re-establishes it at its original depth when you navigate to the previous frame. Since your code-created MovieClip is at that depth, it gets wiped out. At least this is my current explanation.

Maybe you have a better theory and want to download the .fla to check it out. Regardless, I currently think that there is no good way to simulate a timeline layer with code.

The code is:

stop();
trace("library_mc starts at depth: "+this.library_mc.getDepth());
this.library_mc.lineStyle(3,0xFF0000,100);
this.library_mc.moveTo(50,100);
this.library_mc.lineTo(200,150);
if (counter == undefined) counter = 0;
counter++;
trace("creating code_mc for the time: "+counter);
this.createEmptyMovieClip("code_mc", this.getNextHighestDepth());

this.code_mc.swapDepths(this.library_mc);

this.code_mc.lineStyle(1,0x0000FF,80);
this.code_mc.moveTo(200,50);
this.code_mc.lineTo(50, 150);

green_btn.onRelease = function(){
	this._parent.nextFrame();
}

red_btn.onRelease = function(){
	this._parent.prevFrame();
}
frame_txt.text = "I am on frame 1";
this.onEnterFrame = function(){
	frame_txt.text = "I am on frame " + _currentFrame;
	trace("library_mc depth "+this.library_mc.getDepth());
}

Using AS2 onEnterFrame to speed the display of MovieClips

2011-04-16T02:50:00.000-07:00

ActionScript 2 broadcasts the onEnterFrame event regularly. If a movie is running at 24 frames per second, you would expect to see it every 1000/24 milliseconds, or about every 42 ms. By using traces like

trace("starting frame at "+(new Date()).getTime());

you can actually measure the passage of time.

It turns out that like many of our 7.5 hour work days, a frame actually can last a lot longer than its appointed 42 ms, if there is a lot of work to get finished. Recently, I have been working on a tool that graphs skips on a number line. Operations are menu-driven. The tool currently has about 4000 lines of code, the menu another 1600 and a variety of other classes are used to create buttons, text, stepper widgets etc. In all, it takes about 2500 ms to display. If all of that code executes on one frame, the wait is agonizing. Nothing is displayed until all the code is executed.

There are ways to tell Flash that it can pause and update the screen. One is to break up the code into functions that are called with onEnterFrame.

private function step1():Void{
   this.drawContainer();
   this.createEmptyMovieClip("timer", this.getNextHighestDepth());

   this.timer.onEnterFrame = function(){
      this._parent.step2();
   }
}
private function step2():Void{
   this.drawTool();

   this.timer.onEnterFrame = function(){
      this.parent.step3();
   }
}
private function step3():Void{
   delete this.timer.onEnterFrame;
   this.drawMenu();
}

and another is to use setTimeout, which unfortunately was left out of the list of keywords for AS classes and must be envoked in a strange way.

_global["setTimeout"](this, "step2", 0);

In my tests, I could not see that either approach was better and stuck with the onEnterFrame approach, since it was the one I tried second. Now, I see a container on the screen as soon as step 1's code is done, after about 40 ms. I see the number line and some options next and finally I see the menu appear. The illusion of progress is very satisfying compared to waiting the full 2500 ms for the container to appear. The screen doesn't actually change after about 900 ms, since a lot of the work is to set up subMenus and configuration panels that are not immediately visible. Each of these frames take significantly longer than 42ms to perform, but giving pause after each visible change provides a much better result.

Generally, it is a pain for a class to take up more than one frame's worth of code, since the programmer would have to wait to customize or work with the instance. This is mitigated by having the class broadcast an event when it is all done.

this.broadcastMessage("onSkipCountingToolReady", this);

The program can listen for the event and then perform subsequent operations, without having to guess how many frames or how many milliseconds to wait before it is safe.

How can you make an Actionscript 2 function know about itself? How do you copy all functions from one movieclip to another?

2011-03-10T03:54:00.001-08:00

Scoping has got to be one of the most tricky things in programming in Actionscript. A function like:

this.shape_mc.onPress = function(){
    trace(this);
}

will trace out the path to this.shape_mc when shape_mc is pressed, unless call or apply is used. If the same function above is invoked using call:

this.shape_mc.onPress.call(this.shape2_mc);

the path to this.shape2_mc will be traced!

Recently, there have been a number of times when I want a function to know about itself, the way shape_mc knows about itself as "this" in the function above. Here is a simple example of how that can be done:

//create a triangle
this.createEmptyMovieClip("triangle_mc", this.getNextHighestDepth());

this.triangle_mc.beginFill(0x00a900, 100);
this.triangle_mc.lineStyle(1, 0xFF0000, 100);
this.triangle_mc.moveTo(50,0);
this.triangle_mc.lineTo(100, 83);
this.triangle_mc.lineTo(0, 83);
this.triangle_mc.lineTo(50,0);
this.triangle_mc.endFill();

this.triangle_mc.onRelease = function(){
 this._parent.traceEvent.call(this, arguments.callee.name);
}
this.triangle_mc.onReleaseOutside = function(){
 this._parent.traceEvent.call(this, arguments.callee.name);
}

this.triangle_mc.onRelease.name = "onRelease";
this.triangle_mc.onReleaseOutside.name = "onReleaseOutside";

this.traceEvent = function(type:String){
 trace("An event of type:"+type+" happened to "+this);
}

From which you get output like:


    An event of type:onRelease happened to _level0.triangle_mc
    An event of type:onReleaseOutside happened to _level0.triangle_mc

There are three subtle things going on here. One is that arguments.callee is a self-reference to the function that is being executed. The second is that a function can be assigned properties, like name. Lastly, using call with traceEvent means that the "this" is changed from "_level0" to the first parameter in the call statement, in this case, _level0.triangle_mc.

You can find examples on the web where arguments.callee is used to implement recursion, like this one where the names of all functions are set recursively.

You can even set a property on a function to be another function, like


this.triangle_mc.onRelease.tracingFunction = this.traceEvent;

In which case the onRelease function could be:


this.triangle_mc.onRelease = function(){
 arguments.callee.tracingFunction.call(this, arguments.callee.name);
}

Getting dizzy yet?

Like call, apply lets you set the scope of a function, but the parameters are supplied in an array. The following example is the definition of a function in a class ubMath called coordsToGlobal which is used in the documented example to draw a bounding rectangle around one movieClip on another one.


/**returns an array of global (stage coordinates)
*@param mc (MovieClip) the movieclip that the coordinates are respect to.
*@param x (Number) the x coordinate in mc's coordinate system
*@param y (Number) the y coordinate in mc's coordinate system
*@param global_mc (MovieClip) optional movieclip to express the coordinates with respect to.  If undefined, it will truly be global.
*@returns (Array) [x, y]
*@example 

 import edu.clips.util.ubMath;

 var boundsObj:Object = mc.getBounds();
 var container:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip("ubDebug_bounding"+(new Date()).getTime()+"_mc", _root.getNextHighestDepth());
 container.lineStyle(3, 0xFF0000, 70);
 container.moveTo.apply(container, ubMath.coordsToGlobal(mc, boundsObj.xMin, boundsObj.yMin));
 container.lineTo.apply(container, ubMath.coordsToGlobal(mc, boundsObj.xMax, boundsObj.yMin));
 container.lineTo.apply(container, ubMath.coordsToGlobal(mc, boundsObj.xMax, boundsObj.yMax));
 container.lineTo.apply(container, ubMath.coordsToGlobal(mc, boundsObj.xMin, boundsObj.yMax));
 container.lineTo.apply(container, ubMath.coordsToGlobal(mc, boundsObj.xMin, boundsObj.yMin));

*/
public static function coordsToGlobal(mc:MovieClip, x:Number, y:Number, global_mc:MovieClip):Array {
 var myPoint:Object = {x:x, y:y};
 mc.localToGlobal(myPoint);
 if (global_mc != undefined) global_mc.globalToLocal(myPoint);
 return [myPoint.x, myPoint.y];
}

You can also use arguments to pick up the parameters passed to a function. In the following example a function is created on newMc for every function in mc. The new function calls the old function on mc, scoped with newMc, with all the parameters that got passed to it.


for (var item in mc) {
 if (typeof(mc[item]) == "function"){
  newMc[item] = function(){
   var argArray:Array = new Array();
   for (var i=0; i<arguments.length;i++){
    argArray.push(arguments[i]);
   }
   return arguments.callee.functionDuplicatedFrom.apply(this, argArray);
  }
  newMc[item].functionDuplicatedFrom = mc[item];
 }
}

Oh no, I've said too much
I haven't said enough...

Why can't my new Dell compile Flash CS4 files faster?

2010-10-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

All the serious geeks at Adobe must use Macs.

I have a new Dell Studio XPS 1645 with 8GB of RAM, an i7 Q820 processor @ 1.73GHz, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit OS (giving it a 5.9 Windows Experience score). It takes 39 seconds for this beast to compile one of our CLIPS activities. My confreres running Macs get it done in about 15 seconds. Today, I tried compiling the same .fla on a 4.5 year old MacBook (not a Pro) and it took 18 seconds. Then I tried my 3.5 year old Dell running Windows XP and it took 28 seconds.

Why doesn't an upgrade feel like one?

I have looked around the web for ideas about how to get Flash to compile an .fla faster but haven't found anything helpful. Maybe I should use the XP virtualization that came with the Windows 7 machine or use DropBox to distribute my computing power.

Does anyone have any similar experiences and especially any that will speed up the process?

Sluggish and Lonely in PC land,

Mathfester

Should have stuck with talking about goalies!

2010-05-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

I remember a Euclid Problem that was referred to as "that old chestnut - the goalie problem". This teacher should have stuck to talking about goalies...

Literacy, Student Engagement, Images and TED

2010-05-20T03:16:00.000-07:00

Jesse Brown, host of TVO's Search Engine podcast, spoke at the recent TEDxOntarioEd event in London. It is kind of ironic that I listened to this talk on Rodd Lucier's Clever iPod app, given its heavy reliance on visuals. I did this on the same day that I received word that one of our innovative teachers, Lynda Marshall was awarded a Literacy prize from Nipissing University, in part for her work with graphic novels.

One of my former students, David Kennedy, has been working on Bitstrips as well. Bitstrips for Schools is licensed by the Ministry of Education for Ontario's publicly-funded schools.

Enjoy!

Computation is destined to be the Defining Idea of Our Future

2010-05-19T03:51:00.000-07:00

Is Stephen Wolfram a Clive Cussler-esque egomaniac or a visionary? When do we tell students about this - or are we too busy hoping they don't find out that Wolfram Alpha factors trinomials?

TLDR

2010-05-19T02:24:00.000-07:00

Will Richardson mentions this recently.

I have been thinking a lot about how learning objects like CLIPS can be precise and concise at the same time.

Did you get through all that?

We need more patient problem solvers

2010-05-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

Dan Meyer says a mouth-full!

Need more? Spend time in his "What can you with this?" series.

It is not everyday that I re-post something I find at the Kitchen Table Math blog which they recommend!

NFB Performance Rights

2010-04-21T05:35:00.000-07:00

I just received this message from the Near North's Educational Technology Coordinator, Jane Henderson:

I received an update from the Ontario Educational Software people (OESS) and as of April 1st, the Ontario Government has paid for performance rights – classrooms, libraries, etc.. Please go to www.nfb.ca (The National Film Board). There are no passwords – all we need to do is go to the website and enjoy. This is a great educational site, so please make sure you forward this message to the staff at your school.

So, I don't need a lot of encouragement to pursue a diversion! And I have been looking for a film that I remember with fondness from my school days, The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes by Bill Mason. Not only did I find it, but I can embed it here. Besides its interesting geological information, it reminds us of the significant damage that is being done to the Great Lakes by human activity.

See my earlier post about another movie I remember with fondness, the Log Driver's Waltz.

Troitsky Bridge Building Champs

2010-03-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

My son, Neil, who is a Civil Engineering student at McMaster University, was part of the winning team in the 2010 Troitsky Bridge Building Competition.

In the video below, you will see Neil's shadow on the right and then he will appear in the frame, wearing his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen garb. The digital readout shows the total carrying capacity in kg. The previous record was around 2500 kg. There is a nice writeup on McMaster's site, which looks like it may be replaced eventually, and a scraped one on the Exchange magazine site, which provides some context before watching the video.

The McMaster release included this photo (Neil is on the extreme right).

It made folks who have known Neil a long time think back to his creations using Lego, K'nex and even cardboard and tape as a child.

Regular Expressions in Excel

2010-03-11T12:16:00.000-08:00

Once I learned a bit about regular expressions in Actionscript 2, I wanted to use them in Microsoft Excel.

It turns out that there is a VBA extension for Regular Expressions and a installable set of custom functions for Excel that includes regular expressions. To make it work, here is what I did:

In Excel, hit alt-F11 to bring up the code screen.
Choose Tools | References and check Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5
Close Excel.
Download and install Morefunc 5 from download.cnet.com.
Open Excel and start writing functions like "=REGEX.SUBSTITUTE(V2, " .......$| ....... |^....... |^......$|^.......$"," ???????? ")"

To learn more, check out the Morefunc documentation, sites like this, or sites that I referred to in my previous post. You can also write your own functions like lispy does.

Open Question: What do Excel for Mac users do?

Pretty soon you will be ordering this cup:

Regular Expressions in Actionscript 2

2010-03-11T11:09:00.000-08:00

Regular Expressions are a powerful method of working with text strings based on dynamic patterns. For example, you might want to extract all the numbers from a string like "Michael travels 550km in 6.2 hours using 40L of gasoline", or replace any occurrence of "INV" followed by an arbitrary number of alphanumerics followed by a space with "- reference removed -".

Regular Expressions are useful in parsing user input or creating grammars for strings.

Flash decided not to support a RegExp class in Actionscript 2, though it is implemented in Actionscript 3, Javascript, and JScript.

Pavils Jurjans bemoaned this fact and created his own RegExp class for Flash 5, which was encapsulated by Joey Lott into a .as file for Actionscript 2. Pavils also created a very handy tester, which together with websina's page, helped me to get started with regular expressions.

The CLIPS programmers have started to use our version of the class, which has been documented with ZenDocs, and includes a trim, rtrim, ltrim and slightly modified replace method. A simple tester .fla is available to interact with the class.

I probably feel as excited learning this new skill as the fellow in this xkcd.com comic.

Running DOS Games on Windows

2010-03-09T03:30:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I mentioned trying to get Colourful Math to work on Windows, collecting a few delicious bookmarks along the way.

Today, I downloaded dosbox after a bit of an internet search to get a sense of its reliability (since the zombie-like dude in the top corner did not inspire a lot of confidence). dosbox allows you to run all sorts of DOS programs under Windows, Mac and Linux - Doom and Railroad Tycoon (which is a free download now) seem especially popular.

When you run doxbox, type

mount c: c:\colourfulmath (where c:\colourfulmath is the directory where the files are)

c:
dir
cd clrmath
4colours (the bat or exe)

and voila!, you have a blast from the past in a nice tidy emulator (or virtual console?) window.

I received a very pleasant email from the Claude Laflamme, the developer (with Industry Canada funding) of Colourful Math. He indicated that his developer interest turned to lyryx.com and Colourful Math has not been ported to any more modern operating systems.

I was thinking that folks of a certain age (probably over 18) might like to know that there could be a way to play their favorite MS-DOS games on their current operating systems, using dosbox, if they are keen on having waves of nostalgia wash over them. My kids spent hours on the evaluation version of Soleau games like Wallpipe, Ant Run and Bolo Ball - which are still available - the rousing Sine Dancing-like antrun theme is playing on my speakers as I type (even after exiting!).

How useful are games in teaching Math?

2010-03-08T03:28:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about this question for a while and the answer depends a lot on the type of games we are talking about. There are cross-number puzzles, ciphers to decode pun-ish riddles, drill and practice games, role-playing games, etc.

It may be that "game" is a organizer for "play" which is really a state of engagement. Students can engage in a game for hours, puzzling out the rules and feeling accomplishment.

I wish that I could be at Maria Andersen's presentation - Playing to Learn Math.

Playing to Learn Math? on Prezi

Does our view of Math education allow us to imagine a time when a robot could do a better job of much of our teaching, as the Koreans and Japanese are working on?

This week my daughter, who is studying Math at UW and is currently in a graph theory course, was reminded of a set of games that she played as a youngster - expressly designed to introduce colouring problems in an engaging way. They are MS-DOS based and I have got them to run enough to recognize the screens, but not really to enjoy.

When I am trying to get Sketchpad or Flash to produce a certain figure or interaction, I can enter an engaged state that social psychologists refer to as "Flow", which I find enjoyable.

Keith Devlin would like a couple of hundred million dollars to develop a MMP game that would allow players to construct math learning. I admit to being a tad skeptical, but what would such an environment be worth?

What role have games and play had in your Mathematical development?

Farewell Kate

2010-01-22T03:32:00.000-08:00

Anyone who was a schoolchild when I was has a particular affinity for this NFB short. The world said goodbye to Kate McGarrigle this week.

I found this video about a planned re-make of the short, but can't seem to find if it was ever made.

Using a CLIPS Activity in SMART Notebook

2009-12-22T04:08:00.000-08:00

CLIPS are a collection of Math Learning Objects that are organized along research-based instructional trajectories. Greg Clarke gave a complete session at the ECOO Conference in November on ways that having an interactive whiteboard enhances the use of CLIPS.

Giancarlo Brotto, Education Consultant for SMART Technologies in Ontario, presented at one of Advanced Presentation Products Discovery Days in North Bay this fall. He impressed the crowd with his demonstration of the new SMART Notebook Math product and the use of SMART's student response system. I reminded him about CLIPs and the efforts that were made to make them useful offline to teachers. He then created this short demonstration and posted in to the Ontario SMART Forum.

I rank 28th!

2009-12-16T04:15:00.000-08:00

in North Bay...

From http://feedjit.com/myRank/

Check your Geoblogosphere ranking

NOTE: You must have Feedjit's Live Traffic Feed installed on your blog or website to be listed in the Geoblogosphere. You must not be an adult website and your site can not be web spam or contain any malware.

We also check if your site has been listed as spam, adult, containing malware or if you have been listed as a dangerous site with Google or any other companies.

You Rank #28 in: North Bay, Canada
You Rank #191 in: Erie, United States
You Rank #399 in: Waterville, United States
You Rank #548 in: Rochester, United States
You Rank #605 in: Saint-Priest, France
You Rank #625 in: Auckland, New Zealand
You Rank #749 in: San Giovanni Lupatoto, Italy

Note: We analyze the cities that have sent you the most traffic recently. You may rank in many other cities in the Geoblogosphere.

Does ukulele music appeal disproportionately to geeks?

2009-12-13T02:44:00.000-08:00

One early morning this week, when I definitely had better things to do, a blog post at Inside the CBC, led me to this video by Tim Tamashiro:

So then I decided to see what else was on youtube using infinitube.net. The leading video there now is the one that Greg liked so much. My pre-dawn surfing, however, led me to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

If, as I hypothesize, these performances appeal more to geeks than the general population, maybe you will like these videos. There are lots more there.

Comment Moderation

2009-12-13T02:41:00.000-08:00

I have reluctantly turned on comment moderation since the spam comments outnumber by far the real comments. I don't like doing this, but it seems more time efficient.

Is anyone else being plagued by spam comments? Has there been a rash of them in the last six weeks or has some evil blog directory been updated to include mine?

Happy 2nd Birthday

2009-10-26T03:31:00.000-07:00

My blog is now into its third year and although I have plenty of ideas for posts, I seem to have placed writing them at a very low priority. Most of my ideas for posts require more concentration and research than I think I can muster. I often check my Feedjit traffic - about 15 visits a day for topics closely related to my interests or as far away as the visit by someone searching for "dream about number 127". Recently, I noticed for the first time a visit by someone from a Google Doc (that I don't have access to) and someone leaving the page from my embedded delicious feed at the left of the screen. That was a link to what I thought was a fair-minded and well-written piece in the Washington post about a teacher trying to encourage Math talk in her classroom.

If you are looking to follow a blogger who is more prolific, may I again suggest Doug Peterson. Just one day of his delicious feed is inspiring.

It has been two years full of learning and thinking about the effect of Web 2.0 on education, much of it chronicled at http://mathfest.wikispaces.com. /Web2.0+For+Math+Educators. Thanks for your part in it.

Where are the Math Project sites?

2009-09-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

Neil Munro shared a spreadsheet with me of the medal counts by country at the 2008 Olympic Games. You may know that the press in Canada was critical of the performance of the Canadian team, especially prior to a run of medals toward the end of the games. If you adjust the medal count for the population of the country, Canada does better than the United States and much better than China. Others have adjusted for a nation's GDP. Depending on the method used, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Zimbabwe fare very well.

It struck me that the question is a good one for a mathematics exploration - especially since the source data is available in lots of locations, including wikipedia and there are media reports and analysis all over the web. Vancouver 2010 is fast approaching too.

I went looking for a repository of good open-ended questions like this and came up with the square root of 0.

Surely, there is some interested wikiphile who is compiling such things. Isn't there?

If you know of some good resources, please let me know.

A Mathematical Search Engine?

2009-05-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

There has been a fair bit of buzz about Wolfram Alpha and even comparisons to Google, but I don't think I really started to get it until I saw Maria H. Andersen's Picasa Web Album via Teaching College Mathematics.

Now the wheels are turning. How is Math education going to change with tools like these available to students? CAS tells students answers, this tells students questions.

Representations of Linear Growing Patterns Cluster Launched

2009-05-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

It is with a lot of pleasure that I am able to announce the launch of a new cluster of CLIPS.

Representations of Linear Growing Patterns is based on research conducted by Ruth Beatty at the Institute for Child Studies in Toronto. Although it does not flesh out the experiences that students would have in Grades 4-6 with concrete materials, it certainly alludes to them. Students take pictorial representations, based on coloured tiles, of a pattern and develop graphical representations and algebraic rules. They then explore the role of the constant and multiplier in the pattern rules. One Near North teacher blogged about the change it made in her understanding and about her experience trying it in her classroom.

Among the material created for the cluster are a graphing tool and an open-ended tool to explore the relationships between the representations, including stories and the algebraic equation. The graphing tool is described carefully in Clip 2, Activity 4: Practice Graphing. The Rainbow DSB is conducting a "book study" of this cluster. I hope that soon we can feature some innovative ways to use the Exploring Representations tool resulting from their work. I am hoping to engage the Web 2.0 math teacher community to address the question "What can we do with this?".

The cluster movie is quite different from the "Who Cares?" movies developed for Fractions and Periodic Functions. The overview movie, which should be viewed after working through the development, summarizes the cluster nicely.

There are several improvements to the CLIPS "wrapper", including the ability to set a volume level or mute that is respected throughout navigation and a new scene selector. The major videos can be viewed fullscreen without downloading a huge source file. Trish Steele narrates a new 12-minute introduction to the wrapper that is well worth the time.

Since the activities are primarily flash animations (SWF) with embedded narration, the files are relatively big. The design of CLIPS does not depend on any server technology. Teachers or students who wish to use the activities, but don't want to depend on an internet connection, can download the entire thing and point to the index.html file at the root, for local use.

We thought it would be done earlier and there are still some rough edges (please use the Feedback link at the top right to record anything that you notice) but we are very happy to now have the work officially in circulation.

OAME Banquet

2009-05-18T06:24:00.000-07:00

I am just back from the OAME Conference in Ottawa, the city of my up-bringing. As usual the conference was a great experience and I even stayed a day and enjoyed scaling the Gatineau Park on a bicycle.

I helped to nominate Joel Yan for a well-deserved OAME award. At the banquet, he told a hilarious story about being fired from a volunteer job for his love of Math. It turns out that he was volunteering at the bingo hall selling tickets and the like when his big break came. The caller was leaving and they needed someone who could talk loudly, read numbers in English and French and be enthusiastic. Joel fit the bill. He correctly called B8, but when B9 showed up next he called "Add one". There was a lot of confusion and an official warning to "just call the numbers". Joel behaved for a night or two, but when 32 rolled out of the machine, he couldn't help but call "two to the fifth", thus ending his stint as a Bingo caller.

The OAME banquet featured some comedians from Absolute Comedy. The first comic had trouble following Joel, since he had a paucity of exponential humour. Rick Currie came up next cracking jokes about assessment, government workers and the like. My favourite was his ending song about Billy Bob Thornton. You can find some of his other bits on Youtube, but I have his permission to post this bit here.

If you haven't seen the interview - it is worth seeing just for the cringe value.

Once you have watched that, the song below will make more sense.

Here is a photo of Joel and I.

Mathematical Music

2009-05-09T04:03:00.000-07:00

There have been a surprising number of posts here about poetry.

Here is some Mathematical Music, via Heather. Better to watch at Youtube with the lyrics visible.

The Klein 4 Group.

Coincidence?

2009-04-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

A fantastic video by Rives at Ted exploring the nature of coincidence and revealing a deeply disturbing conspiracy.

and a poignant love story...

'nuff said.

Geek Ruby Poetry

2009-04-15T06:23:00.000-07:00

From dougpete's delicious feed comes the 99 Bottles of Beer site. The site features the code to produce the lyrics in 1264 different programming languages and variations.

One that caught my eye was Ruby.

One commenter wrote:

This may not be the shortest and most efficient version, but it's definitely the version that was the most fun to read.
Especially the parts "wall.call" if you need the next bottle, "step = method :buy" if you have no beer left and "beer.drink" as what to do in each stanza.

I would actually call it a geek poem.

For those of you who don't code Ruby: Learn Ruby, so you can enjoy reading this poem and writing your next scripts/applications/whatever.

There are "poems" written in Actionscript, Pascal, Turing, APL and lots more.

Poetry is a bit of an unintentional recurring theme in this blog. There certainly are times when programming feels elegant and creative and expressive. It certainly has plenty of rules that constrain - syntax, keywords, etc. Maybe it is like Haiku on a grand scale!

The Joys of Google Earth

2009-04-09T03:40:00.000-07:00

I got my edition of the Google Earth Sightseer today and spent a little time updating Google Earth, downloading the browser plugins, and generally reminding myself of how cool it is.

There is a contest to create models of bridges in Google Sketchup for inclusion on Google Earth. How authentic would that be for students?

You can map the big melt. Global warming made real.

You can look at up-to-date Earthquake data and wonder why there has been such a serious earthquake in Italy, seemingly far away from fault lines.

You can even view photos of the area to see what it looks like. That's current Current Affairs.

The next step is probably figuring out how to program the browser plug-in!

Friday Funny Care of Microsoft

2009-04-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has some very funny spots. Maybe it helps explain why they charge so much for some of their products.

The videos below are from the collection found here.
The embedding below only works in IE for me.

I have blogged previously about the Software Architect guy video from Microsoft.

Embed Flickr Slideshows with flickrSLiDR

2009-03-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

This via Patricia Donaghy. The slide show below is of my favorites - mainly coming from an RSS feed of the images tagged with "Geometry". However, you can create an embeddable slide show of any combination of user, group and tag that you like.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The Google Maps API

2009-03-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

I have been learning a lot about javascript and the Google Maps API lately. If you are interested, you might find my delicious tags helpful. It includes links to sets of map markers that have been painstakingly created and then shared.

I have created a geocoding tool that shows off some of my learning. It will allow you to enter an address and get its lat/long coordinates. It also displays the lat/long coordinates of the centre of the map in case the address isn't enough. If you view the source, I have commented the more interesting bits.

The tool is a dumbed-down version of one that I am working on with all the Thunder Bay Community Services Agencies.
It takes 20 or 30 seconds to map the hundreds of addresses out of their database, assign different markers, set up the interactions, and display the results on three maps.

It has been interesting to apply my growing knowledge of actionscript (which is a derivative of javascript) to the object model of a browser page.

Math in the Movies

2009-02-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

If you are going to subscribe to only one delicious feed, choose dougpete, unless you already subscribe to his blog.

Here is a beauty of a site that Doug tagged: Mathematics in Movies.

Right now it has about 80 clips from movies that involve math, including the explanation of why 7 times 13 is 28 below from Abbott and Costello's In the Navy, which I just love and the clip from Harold and Kumar that I wrote about previously.

Happy V-D!

2009-02-14T06:26:00.000-08:00

Here is a Valentine's gift for that someone 'special'.

Thanks to Kaz for alerting me to this and for his contribution to the book:

How would you represent the pain of moving ego to zero, though?

Here is a gift suggestion

2009-02-13T13:20:00.000-08:00

You can get it at thinkgeek.com. I am an XL.

BTW, Happy 1234567890 Day!

What could you do with this?

2009-02-12T06:17:00.000-08:00

Dan Meyer has posted some photos and videos and wondered what Math teachers could do with them. I have been wondering the same thing about some of my recent Flickr favorites.

So let me ask you the question - What do you make of this?

It is from the site where we get our paystubs from.

Finding Points of Intersection with The Geometer's Sketchpad

2009-02-11T18:58:00.000-08:00

So Frank asked me about finding intersections of plotted linear functions at our Web 2.0 session last week. It turns out that constructing the intersection of two lines is trivial but of two function plots is not.

I told him the story about how happy I was to have written a custom tool to take two linear functions as input and create their point of intersection for Stephanie. The .gsp file is here.

At least, I was happy until I asked my pal Shawn Godin about it and he very quickly created a sketch that takes two polynomial functions (and maybe other kinds), and the origin and plots the functions, creates a locus of all the points of intersection found using Newton's Method, and labels one of them. You can then drag the point on the locus through all the points of intersection. His .gsp file is here.

Guess which one of us is working on our PhD in Mathematics?

Thanks Shawn for giving me permission to share the sketch. I'll be curious to see if this post gets as much traffic as the post about graphing inequations in Sketchpad, which also reported Shawn's guru status in the Sketchpad community.

Oh Carina

2009-02-08T04:43:00.000-08:00

I have been involved with introducing educators to Web 2.0 and have tried to write compelling, serious reasons why they should care about it - and I think those reasons are right. But, a good part of my enjoyment of the web is the finding something delightful that exhibits the best of the human spirit - something remarkably creative or intelligent or funny.

It happened to me this morning just as I was about to delete a post by David Pogue about iPhone apps. I don't own an iPhone. Luckily, I scrolled down. David was writing about the iPhone apps store where users can download apps for $1. His example was an app by Smule called Ocarina. It turns your iPhone into a wind instrument. You blow into the microphone, finger the screen and the speakers play. Here's the demonstration that he mentions:

Not only that, but there is social aspect. Like Wikipedia Vision, you can view a map of the world and listen in on people playing their music anywhere in the world. You can even record your work and view sheet music for the Ocarina.

As a math educator, I get excited about students bringing their Mobile Internet device to school and having access to a wealth of resources and tools (like a CAS graphing calculator!!!). I hadn't really thought about the device giving them a $1 musical instrument to play. There is something oddly full-circle-ish about this. Computers putting stage musicians out of business and then turning everyone into amateur musicians.

I was thinking of this song from Danny Marks, of CBC Radio's Basic Black's feature called the Hum Line, when I wrote the post's title. I was way more excited to meet him last year at Jeff Healey's Roadhouse than he was to meet me.

Web 2.0 for Ontario Math Leaders (reprise)

2009-02-07T05:17:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I asked for help in creating a one day workshop on Web 2.0 for Math Education leaders. My Personal Learning Network provided some excellent ideas in the comments.

The workshop was delivered yesterday to an eager and experienced group. Many indicated that they had seen Will Richardson at one of his appearances in Ontario, like the EDUGAINS symposium, and were ready to do more with Web 2.0.

In preparation for the session, I worked on a wiki to capture some of our ideas about

* What is Web 2.0 and why should Math Educators Care
* What are some Web 2.0 Tools (with a page for each)

I have updated the wiki with some of the ideas of the participants as well. It is a little light in the sections that I was not responsible for. Perhaps some of you will edit it to beef it up.

If you were at the session yesterday, please feel free to comment and describe a interesting discovery that you made or pose a question that is still bothering you.

Theo Jansen - reinventing the wheel - for real

2009-01-30T05:41:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I posted a video of a very neat Geometer's Sketchpad sketch simulating Theo Jansen's beach animals. However, I didn't investigate the source of this effort.

Today, I read Barbara McLaughlin's post which embedded the video of Theo Jansen's TED talk, below. Astonishing what problems the human mind turns itself to. As Barbara points out this is the kind of delight that is a reward for maintaining a Personal Learning Network.

Math Coaching in Ontario

2009-01-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

The provincial government has announced a large investment in Math Coaches (Grades 7-12).

I have created a wiki page with some support links (please feel free to add to it).

Does anyone have any experience with coaching at this level that they are willing to share?

Mathematical Poetry?

2009-01-15T04:39:00.000-08:00

This is not as deep as Kaz's stuff, but comes from Harold and Kumar by way of the College Math Teacher,

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

I probably should have saved that for Valentine's Day, but I have something else up my sleeve for that.

Once again mathematical proficiency is associated with embarrassing lameness - sigh.

We are number 1 - oops, we are number 127!

2009-01-07T15:51:00.000-08:00

According to a list of the top 200 jobs, Mathematicians have the best job. Teachers, unfortunately, hit the list at 127 - right between Vending Machine Repairer and Buyer.

See the related story, sent on to me by Dr. Doug Franks - maybe he was trying to cheer Dr. Dan Jarvis up on his birthday!

Added an Equation Editor to my Blog

2008-12-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

If you scroll to the very bottom of the page you should see an equation editor that I found via the Charlotte Area Math Teacher's Wiki (recommended by Vic in the comments to the previous post).

You can generate mathematical text visually or using Latex and save the resulting image as a .png. The Latex code is also useful in various other equation editors or for embedding mathematical text in blogs or wikis.

How cool is that!

Web 2.0 for Grade 7-12 Mathematics Leaders and Teachers

2008-12-11T04:49:00.000-08:00

Jeff, Greg, Frank and I are presenting Web 2.0 to a group of Mathematics Leaders for a full day in February. We have been thinking about how to introduce them to the Web 2.0 world and make connections to their personal learning (easy) and their classroom practice (harder).

Here is a test of the strength of my professional network:

What topics, concepts, exercises, or messages would you see as vital for such a day? What pitfalls should be avoided? What is the elevator pitch for Web 2.0 to Math teachers?

Absolutely Bone Chilling

2008-11-25T05:11:00.000-08:00

I have been casually following the case of Julie Amero, a computer-illiterate supply teacher, who fell into the hands of the law after a disturbing run-in with pornographic pop-ups.

Now, from Ars Technica,

"It's over," said Julie Amero. "I feel wonderful."

This is not, to be sure, how most people would react upon being slapped with a $100 fine and having their professional credentials revoked. But after a four-year ordeal, during which the unassuming substitute teacher was decried as "disgusting" in the local press and convicted of felonies carrying a 40-year prison term, the plea agreement she reached with Connecticut prosecutors Friday must have come as a relief—even though a forensic report made public today shows she probably did nothing wrong.

The whole story is worth reading, even if it gives pause to anyone involved with using the internet with children in an ignorant and self-protective bureaucracy.

I laughed out loud!

2008-11-21T05:27:00.000-08:00

From Doug Peterson's del.icio.us stream:

Let me google that for you
This is for all those people that find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.
(tags: weird web utilities useful tools share)

I visited the site, typed my favorite search term ("Ubersketch") and laughed out loud when I saw the result. Now, will I be brave enough to send that to a querier (that is someone who poses a query - which reminds me of an off-colour joke about the effeminate English teacher...)?

Geoff Day told me again that there is no such thing as a dumb question, but in my heart of hearts, I tend to disagree.

Myers-Briggs for a Blog

2008-11-18T04:29:00.000-08:00

Just last week a colleague explained how I am a ENTJ.
The Typealyzer site, via Web Tools for Teachers, indicates that my blog is not:

The analysis indicates that the author of
http://mathfest.blogspot.com
is of the type:
ESTP - The Doers

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Makes you wonder if I am creating an alternate persona for general consumption.

Nomination for the 2008 Edublog Awards

2008-11-13T14:36:00.000-08:00

Here are my nominations for the 2008 Edublog Awards:

1. Best individual blog: Doug Peterson Off the Record

4. Best resource sharing blog: Jane's e-Learning Pick of the Day

5. Most influential blog post: The Time is Now - Bob Sprankle

6. Best teacher blog: Teaching College Math - Maria H. Andersen

9. Best elearning / corporate education blog: Presentation Zen - Garr Reynolds

11. Best educational use of video / visual: dy/av series - Dan Meyer

Interfaces, Topology and Magic

2008-11-12T06:37:00.001-08:00

I saw this at the Teaching College Math blog some time ago , but thought that Doug Peterson might blog about it, since he is fond of quoting Arthur C. Clarke:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This interface uses an "inspired hack" inspired by topology. It is fun to hear such a bright person talk unassumingly about his work too.

I think students should see and hear stuff like this.

What is your dream interface?

2008-11-12T06:33:00.000-08:00

I have often thought how much I would like a computer to be more like a large drafting table where I could move and manipulate a bunch of Windows. The keyboard might just be one of those moving windows.

Now, SMART seems to be marketing something like this for primary students.

Do you think this will gain traction?

Make your own saccharine posters

2008-11-06T03:25:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post, I featured despair.com's hilarious versions of the pervasive motivational poster.

Now you can create your own online at AutoMotivator. It may not motivate anyone, but it might be an interesting student task. I did this one in about 10 seconds. I think it shows.

The Parody Motivator Generator at despair.com is also a lot of fun. Here is the description from their site.

The War Against Motivation Continues.

For over two decades, the multi-billion dollar motivation industry has unleashed untold suffering upon the workplaces, schools and civil institutions of the world- in the insidious form of the motivational poster. By the millions they have been sold and displayed- these dark instruments of corporate propaganda. While promising to stimulate "Hope", "Success" and "Teamwork", instead these tools of coercion and intimidation have inspired only grief, anger and nausea.

In 1998, one company dared to fight back, as Despair, Inc. introduced Demotivators®, satirical products reverse-engineered from the most powerful motivational posters ever inflicted upon mankind. And now, with the Parody Motivator Generator, we place those very same tools in your less-capable hands- giving you a chance to join us in the battle against an opponent as ubiquitous as it is idiotic. The chance to not only create your very own motivational parodies online, but also to purchase beautiful 11"x14" prints of your designs.

Now, Join The Battle and Make Your Design.

The question designed to elicit the never-appearing comments intentionally left blank.

Is cromulence something you should embiggen?

2008-10-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

While watching a slideshow of my Flickr favorites, I noticed that one of the options is to "Embiggen small things to fill screen". I wondered if someone was transliterating from Japanese.

A quick search led me to a wikipedia article devoted to one particular Simpson's episode that uses the words embiggen and cromulent.

So do you think Flickr is hip or ignorant?

A year of blogging

2008-10-24T05:04:00.000-07:00

It seems de rigeur in the blogosphere to celebrate the anniversary of your first post.

It has been a fun year of learning about all kinds of Web2.0 tools for me.

Here are the stats:

Google Reader reports that I have 25 subscribers and make 0.5 posts per week - I didn't notice that stat improving from 0.0 posts per week until I just checked it.

Google Analytics, which I turned on in January, reports that I have had 2,608 absolute unique visitors and 6,781 pageviews. Interestingly, more people have visited using Firefox than IE. There were even 17 visits using Chrome, but of course those might have all been from me.

A few of my favorite posts:

See Knowledge being created and negotiated in real time which builds on my fascination with Wikipedia. I think it should be one of the wonders of the modern world. I have made edits to the entries on the UberSketch, Calculator, Cartesian Coordinates, Virtual manipulatives for mathematics, among others.
When is the time for digital education, which is undoubtedly my longest post.
The Un-Read Web? which is in the category of geeky stuff that doesn't seem to attract many pageviews, but which I find hilarious and which tweaked my interest in Javascript.
What is Mathematics? What is Multiplication? which attracted the most august and vigorous commenters but which unfortunately happened at a time that I was least engaged in the web world.

Actually, as I look through the 88 posts, I realize that there is something I love in each one.

The traffic indicates that there are some other posts that Google sends a lot of traffic from. Notably,

There are more than a few posts that try to promote some of my work, like the wiki page of online calculators, the wiki page of resources for the Geometer's Sketchpad and the CLIPS collection of mathematical learning objects.

Of course, my blog has been peppered with things that tickle my odd sense of humour.

I would have given up long ago based on the number of comments I receive without the Live traffic feed from Feedjit which I still find fascinating.

Lately, I have had more ideas for blog posts than the inclination to actually write them, so I doubt that there will be 88 posts this year, but I also doubt that there will be zero.

Thanks for reading!

The CLIPS uberCalculator launched!

2008-10-14T03:39:00.001-07:00

I have had the privilege of working on the development of a set of learning objects supporting an instructional trajectory in Fractions, Periodic Functions and Linear Patterns, called CLIPS.

There has been a lot of effort to design a wrapper to complement these activities. One of the elements of this wrapper has been a simple calculator. Recently, Greg Clarke completely overhauled the CLIPS calculator to support four modes: Basic, Scientific, Graphing and Conversion. Greg was able to take advantage of the work of others who have freely shared their code in the opensource spirit. The calculator is available inside CLIPS by clicking its icon at the top right. It is also available standalone at www.oame.on.ca/clips/calculator.html. The URL can be appended with ?mode=basic or ?mode=sci or ?mode=graphing or ?mode=conv as above to jump directly to one of the versions. A drop-down list is used to switch between modes, open the calculator in another window (which makes it resizeable) and to download the .swf locally for offline use, perhaps on an interactive white board.

The CLIPS calculator is now prominently catalogued at the Mathfest wiki page of online calculators, which has lots of other interesting online tools listed.

One nice, inobtrusive feature is that when the equals sign is pressed, the answer is copied to the user's clipboard, ready to be pasted into an answer text field in CLIPS or wherever it might be required. I now have the CLIPS calculator as a link in my quick launch bar.

Live like you only have 54 seconds left

2008-10-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

54 seconds

Virtual PC for the PC

2008-09-25T12:47:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I saw Virtual PC for the Mac - probably 10 years ago. An Apple rep came to the Board Office, plugged his Mac into our network and ran several Microsoft Office applications simultaneously and snappily. He even found one of our network printers and fired off a document to it. All this in a rabidly Windows environment. Magic!

I had a similarly satisfying experience this afternoon, downloading Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 onto my PC and running the disk image with Internet Explorer 6 bundled with it. When launched, I get a window with Windows in it and its own virtual hard drive with its own Program Files and plug-ins. The only non-authentic part of the experience is that the default desktop is not teletubby land. I am using it to test the CLIPS website on IE6, while I have IE7 installed on my non-virtual machine. I have been using javascript to allow CLIPS to have a draggable screen resizing widget and getting familiar with some of the cross-browser compatibility issues that that entails. It should go live shortly.

I wonder whether it would be safer to surf the web with the virtual copy of Windows, avoiding any viruses or nasties that way.

How does Flash Pass Control as it gotoAndPlays frames?

2008-09-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of working on CLIPS is the chance to work with some top-notch Ontario educators, like Greg Rodrigo of Georgian College. As part of this summer's work, we we trying to figure out how actionscript is executed as control is passed to different frames and the onEnterFrame method is called. Greg created a little test file similar to the following:

Create seven keyframes and put the following code in each frame:

onEnterFrame = function() {
trace("I am on frame " + _currentframe);
}
trace("Frame 1");
gotoAndPlay(4);
gotoAndPlay(3);
trace("Frame 2");
trace("Frame 3");
gotoAndPlay(5);
trace("Frame 4");
gotoAndPlay(1);
trace("Frame 5");
trace("Frame 6");
delete onEnterFrame;
stop();
trace("Frame 7");

So here is what the teacher would ask you to do:

Determine what Flash's output window will contain when this file is tested.

We learned a lot about how Flash operates by trying to make this prediction.

STOP: Try it yourself now.

If that question is too hard or open-ended, here are some other questions that might be simpler:

What will the output be the first time the onEnterFrame method is executed?
Will the first output "Frame 2" occur before or after the first output "Frame 4"?
Why does "I am on frame 5" not appear in the output window? (I am not sure what the answer to this question is, so perhaps it is not simpler.)

Please feel free to leave a comment about the last question.

If you don't feel like typing this in yourself, I have posted the .fla source file.

Some Nuggets from my Reader

2008-08-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

Summer has not been a great time to absorb the material being fed to my Google Reader account. In fact, I have been practicing marking items read that aren't and unsubscribing from feeds.

I found four recent things quite interesting though.

1. Tim Hawes' post about Willingham's contention that learning styles don't exist. Have a look at the video posted at Tim's site and some of the references quoted in my comment. I will look forward to reading your musings on Tim's post.

2. Geoff Day, another commun-it blogger, pointed me to an interesting study about how counting is not dependent on having language to name numbers. It made me think of the EQAO tests.

3. At the recent GAINS-CAMPPP, I subscribed to a news feed about Keith Devlin, who commented on my recent post. There I found a long and interesting article from the San Francisco Chronicle about what algebra should be taught in schools. It also has some interesting quotes. My favorite was:

"Algebra ... the intensive study of the last three letters of the alphabet."

4. A post by Gary Stager suggesting ways to better the teaching of geometry (including use Sketchpad, use Logo (but not Scratch)).

What is Mathematics? What is Multiplication?

2008-08-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Text Savvy blog has an interview with Keith Devlin that is worth reading.

Two quotes stood out for me. The first is about the nature of "doing" mathematics:

I think many students give up on mathematics because they don’t see how they could possibly come up with the solutions to problems they see in their textbook, or which the teacher gives on the board, or which some of their classmates produce. What they don’t understand is that the clever argument they have just been presented with was not arrived at by deliberate, rational thought. It was constructed after-the-fact. And so the student misses the crucial lesson that the secret to doing mathematics is not an unusual brain but sheer persistence, trying one thing after another and failing each time until eventually the light comes on.

and the second about the "multiplication as repeated addition" furor:

Using a brittle metaphor (multiplication is repeated addition, for example) inevitably leads to problems later, when the metaphor no longer holds but gets in the way of a better understanding of the concept. It’s hard enough grasping the abstractions of mathematics without compounding the issue with brittle metaphors. One problem is that metaphors inevitably lead to natural inferences. For instance, thinking of multiplication as repeated addition leads to the belief that multiplication makes things bigger. This false belief often persists throughout people’s lives. It’s particularly hard to eradicate since it is often something the child observes him or herself, and as we all know, knowledge we generate ourselves tends to stick like glue. When it comes to mathematics, I think it is probably always unwise to use metaphors as “interim definitions”, which is what often seems to be done, since they all break sooner or later. Rather we should present the student the same instances, but as motivational and illustrative examples of, not metaphors for. Mathematics is abstract. It does students no good in the long term to present it as something concrete. Moreover, there is no need to do so. There is plenty of evidence that children can handle abstraction, particularly when the learning is scaffolded by a range of concrete examples.

Do you think that we make math too tidy for students? Do you have a favourite example of a "brittle metaphor"?

Strangest Search used to find this Blog

2008-07-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

Let's Play Math challenged readers to the following:

Search term meme

I don’t often participate in blog memes, but this was fun to play with. Now I’m throwing it out to you, my fellow bloggers. If you enjoy this sort of thing, consider yourself tagged:

What are the most popular, or the weirdest, search terms that lead people to your blog?

For this blog, the weirdest search phrase has had to have been "what is dropball of the computer?".

Like what was the searcher after?

Squashing the Bugs in Education

2008-06-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

vlorbik sent me to LeftoverPi where it is argued that the Number 1 bug in Education is that it is done by force.

What do you think the biggest bug in K-12 education is?

BTW, there are some interesting posts on LeftoverPi about topics that I have touched on, like the Math Wars and Lockhart's Lament. I love the description of the Number 1 bug in Ubuntu!

On his main page he asks:

If March 14th is Pi Day, what's the 15th?

A nice collection of Math videos on TeacherTube

2008-06-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

My Google blogsearch for Sketchpad unearthed a nice collection of videos on TeacherTube:

Turning del.icio.us bookmarks into blog posts

2008-06-22T05:02:00.001-07:00

Have you noticed that more and more bloggers are doing this?

I am not sure that I like it. If I wanted to subscribe to a blogger's bookmarks, I could add them to my network and subscribe to their feed as I do for dougpete, brightideasguru and beekeeper. Isn't it just enough to let your readers know you tag under a certain name somewhere?

BTW, I tag under the name rossisen.

Maybe, I am just feeling cranky because I have subscribed to more feeds than I seem to be able to handle (I saw the >1000 descriptor this week).

What do you think?

What are students like in a Web 2.0 world?

2008-06-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Doug Peterson introduced me to Michael Wesch's video about Web 2.0 at the RCAC Symposium last year where it was used to introduce Will Richardson. Incidentally, I have heard that Will will be a featured speaker at the Ontario Association for Mathematics Education Annual Conference next May.

Wesch's videos explore mediated culture, seeking to merge the ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology. He is currently working on an ethnography of YouTube.

Today, I was the two millionth person to see this video about what post-secondary students are like:

Here is the original video that I mentioned. It is a fantastic introduction to what Web 2.0 is (much better that Wikipedia's technical talk about CSS and APIs).

Math Manipulatives

2008-06-09T03:36:00.001-07:00

In April of 2005, a group of teachers from North East Ontario got together for a regional Leading Math Success working session and created introductory videos and powerpoints for six Math manipulatives. These were then used in local training events. When I let the participants know that they had been posted to a popular video sharing site, I got lots of replies and recollections about how worthwhile a professional development experience people thought it was - fodder for Judy's resume! The full collection of files has been posted for a while.

Algebra Tiles

Colour Tiles

Connecting Cubes

Fraction Circles

My contribution was a Geometer's Sketchpad sketch - a Fraction Circle tool and virtual manipulative.

Geoboards

Pattern Blocks

Do you ever feel that you are working on the fly?

2008-05-30T12:29:00.001-07:00

Here are two Friday funnies:

The first is a great ad.

Not that great for someone who finds the Ivy Lea Bridge or even the Burlington Skyway scary! Click on the image to see it at full size for the full effect.

The second is an older video taken from Will Richardson's favorites:

Tickling my odd sense of humour

2008-05-27T05:21:00.000-07:00

In a Pair-a-dimes post, David Truss embedded this cartoon:

I thought it was sly, so I looked for some more. I laughed out loud at this one:

A large scale GPS art project

2008-05-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

My blogsearch for Sketchpad bubbled this beauty to the top of my Reader.

The artist drew a self-portrait on the world and recorded the results at the Biggest Drawing in the World site.

The first thing I wondered about was putting the lat/long data into Fathom!

Applied 3D Geometry

2008-05-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

Isn't the internet a fascinating phenomenon? Today, the posting at one of my early favorite blogs is about square watermelons from Japan - oops cubical watermelons. I felt a twinge of incredulity, but found a hoax site that indicates that it is true and a video of a news clip at a popular video sharing site which means it is most certainly true. Apparently, there are also spherical carrots.

Over at my del.icio.us page, I have recently bookmarked several interesting 3D tools, including the one that my buddy Greg used to create the rotating model of an engine's pistons, called Sandy.

Incidently, the link above to the piston's example uses a new feature in CLIPS - the ability to link directly to a scene within an activity. It uses a fairly straightforward javascript technique which communicates to the flash object, but we were excited to be able to make it work. There is a link at the top of the scene to a sequence that describes how the engine works that is worth the trip.

Do we love it enough to take care of it?

2008-05-16T05:12:00.000-07:00

The world, I am writing of.

How long will it take for you to get that song out of your head? Is it only my Canadian sensibility that thinks the missile is out of place?

And if that is too heavy an issue for you, try this Friday Funny from my new favorite New Zealand folk duo parody band, the Flight of the Conchords.

Graphing inequations and inequalities in Sketchpad

2008-05-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

cclancy asked the following question in the Physics forum:

Does anyone know how to graph x > 7 with Geometer's Sketchpad? Is it possible?

I consulted the chief Ontario Sketchpad guru, Shawn Godin and then replied:

It is possible to graph inequalities on a number line or in the plane.

Shawn Godin supplied the first sketch and I am not sure where I picked up the other.

I have been collecting resources for Sketchpad, including the mathforum discussion group where questions like this are routinely and professionally answered. If you need any help deconstructing the methods used in either sketch above, you can contact me through my blog.

Hope this helps,

Ross

Update (May 16): The inequalities in the plane sketch was sent to me by Paul Kunkel in response to a question on the Math forum. Scott Steketee is offering a similar sketch with custom tools to generate the inequations from the mathforum discussion group.

A Dummy Tax

2008-05-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

When I taught computers, the site administrator was not too keen on wasting his valuable time resetting students' passwords, so we instituted a "dummy tax" of $2 (this was a decade or more ago - when two dollars bought stuff). Students who needed a password reset, maybe in January after vacation, paid $2 that went into a fund to buy treats at the end of the year. I only remember one student having to pay and just how incensed he was.

(I created this dummy at a South Park character site, though I am no fan of South Park)

Those of you who are considered technophiles by your friends will relate to my experience this weekend when a tower was dropped off at home for attention. The sixteen year old owner had forgotten his Windows password and needed back in to his system. I haven't had too much hardware experience but gave it the old college try. If it were easy to boot a system for which you don't have the password, there wouldn't be much point in having passwords, would there?

In the end, I installed a second copy of Windows on the box and created two new users (one for me and one for him). I then accessed his documents using a bootable Linux System Rescue CD (Gentoo, I think). The Linux experience that I have gained using the XO and the quick hints on the CD allowed me to mount an NTFS drive, and use Midnight Commander (reminds me of Michael Martchenko) to transfer the documents from the locked copy of Windows to the new copy of Windows. I then deleted the old Windows directory and the locked My Documents directory. A little messy (I deleted a bunch of drivers in the process, I think) but the end result was satisfactory. I don't know if I am brave enough to try booting Linux from the CD on my everyday laptop yet, but soon, I think.

My brother sent me a link to software that will allow an Intel-based Mac to run Windows or Linux.

Are you running Linux on a Windows box for any compelling reason? Can you tip your Fedora gentooly or your red hat ubuntuly towards a distribution that you particularly like?

Resources for The Geometer's Sketchpad

2008-05-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

I have been keeping a list of resources for the Geometer's Sketchpad that I have been giving out at workshops and have posted to the OSAPAC Learning Objects Repository (where it is currently in the top 10 downloads). There are two problems with it:

it goes out of date
I am the only person who adds to it

To solve this, I have posted the document as a wiki page. Please feel free to edit it and add your favorite resources.

The Alladin Factor

2008-05-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

A while back, my father-in-law lent me the audio book series called The Alladin Factor. It talks about the power of just asking for what you want. Good leaders ask the right people to do the right things, for example.

As an application of the idea, I heard Eddie Greenspan, QC on Sounds Like Canada a while back.

Edward Greenspan is one of Canada's most prominent lawyers and recently represented Conrad Black. He was talking about the Peter Demeter trial and the book By Persons Unknown by George Jonas and Barbara Amiel. Anyway, I got it into my head that I should write him and ask for a signed copy. What do you know - upon returning from the OAME conference, there was a package with a signed copy made out to me. Now to read the gruesome details! Maybe I should have asked for three wishes...

Is there something that you got just by asking that surprised you?

Math on a SMART, I mean Interactive White, Board

2008-05-05T16:29:00.000-07:00

In a shout out to someone he calls the Northern Mathman, Geoff Day drew my attention to this incredible Java application for doing mathematics that is particularly well-suited to an IWB or tablet. Although it doesn't work quite as well for me as it does in this introductory video, with a little practice it could change the way I think about equations and mathematical calculations.

You can download it or use it directly on the web.

The Cognitive Surplus

2008-05-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

This video via Will Richardson's blog links gin and sitcoms and makes a compelling argument about how the culture is dealing with the rapid changes of industrial and now post-industrial economies. It is one of the most compelling talks that I have heard in a while - and that without a single slide or image or gimmick. Alan November talked about levering students free time for learning. Clay Shirky talks about levering all learners' time:

Good News on the Video behind the Firewall Front!

2008-04-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

This news via the Using ICT in Further Education blog (you may notice that Patricia is number 1 in the International Edublogger directory and that I am eight times better than that!):

RealPlayer 11 (the basic, free edition) allows you to download video from popular video sites to your RealPlayer library.

Try it from my favorites...

Now, looking at the details in the RealPlayer Library shows that the downloaded file is an FLV. There are other players that you can use beside RealPlayer to show these. I use FLV Player. You may not have as many conversion options using RealPlayer, but you can avoid the pop-ups, ads and general worry that comes from using Zamzar.

Podcasting the Easy Way

2008-04-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Sure, you could record something of pith and merit every week and post it up on iTunes, but I have been doing two easier things:

Posting the sermons from my church up on iTunes using FeedForAll.
Getting CBC to do all the heavy lifting for me. I am the host of this week's Listener 's Choice podcast (direct link). Here is the intro that I wrote (with a little help from the producer!):

Hello, this is the listener's choice podcast, I'm Ross Isenegger in North Bay, Ontario. I would like to hear Shelagh Rogers' interview with Dr. Jane Philpott. Jane is a family doctor and mother of four. Having worked for nearly a decade in Africa, Jane wants to engage as many Canadians as she can in understanding the intolerable reality of the AIDS pandemic. She also has been involved in some creative, practical ways to make change happen. Jane had a daughter who died while she was in Niger but she is adamant that this is no more tragic that what is happening to millions of African mothers and grandmothers who are losing their children to preventable disease.

I have two personal connections to this story. First, I went to Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa with Jane’s husband, Pep in the late seventies and was privileged to meet his remarkable family. As Jane and Pep worked in Niger, my wife and I followed their regular updates and were deeply moved by their sacrifice. Second, my daughter has been involved in AIDS awareness through two local initiatives: Patrick for Life and Youth4Youth. In fact, this month two thousand school children are walking a marathon over 10 weeks while increasing their awareness of AIDS and its local and international impact, culminating in a rally at the North Bay waterfront.

I was very happy to hear about Jane’s work since being in Africa on Sounds Like Canada and to learn of the website that outlines some of Jane’s efforts at giveaday.ca.

This interview originally aired on December 13th, 2007.

CLOSER: This is the listener's choice podcast, selected by me, the listener. If you ever hear something on the radio that you want to hear again, email podcasting@cbc.ca. You can program, and host, your own CBC podcast.

I'm Ross Isenegger, and you're listening to The Choice on CBC Radio One.
You're listening to The Choice on CBC Radio Sirius 137. I'm Ross Isenegger.

I hope you enjoyed my listener pick today on The Choice.
You, too, can request your favourite piece of radio. Contact The Choice through the website cbc.ca/sirius.

The Forrest Gump of Presentations

2008-04-16T05:15:00.000-07:00

If you are reading the same kind of blogs that I do, you have been seeing a lot of embedded Slideshares showing up. Today, at their blog, I read "Everything You Need to Know About Presentations from Forrest Gump (by Scott Schwertly)"

He lists five presentation lessons that you can learn from Forrest:

1. Understand that Presentations are Like a Box of Chocolates

2. Run, Forrest! Run.

3. Repetition is the Fruit of the Sea

4. Become a Presentation General

5. Know What Passion Is

Number 2 would be qualified by Bob Garmston, I imagine, since he is quite worried about extraneous movement. However, a presenter like Scott, uses motion to really good effect.

Are you reluctant to be a twit?

2008-04-16T03:38:00.000-07:00

I know I am.

But Rodd Lucier's latest video has pushed me a little closer to trying Twitter.

Some of the add-on tools especially appeal to me. Who knows, maybe I will be buying a second car and subscribing to cable TV next.

What do you think about Twitter? Can a easily distracted fellow like me really handle it without becoming more of a twit?

Developing the Sine Function for the First Time

2008-04-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

This activity will be part of a much larger 'cluster' of activities in CLIPS. I would be very happy to receive any comments about its effectiveness or suggestions for improvement.

(If your screen isn't wide enough to see this, you can also access it directly)

The Monty Hall Probability Problem in the News

2008-04-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

It is not every day that a famous probability problem is in the news. John Tierney of the New York Times has written a piece about the economist, Dr. M. Keith Chen's challenge to the traditional interpretation of a cognitive dissonance experiment with monkeys. The graphics in this article are especially good. I had to go looking for this piece since Dr. Chen was not given enough time on CBC's "As it Happens" to actually finish explaining his work. Dr. Chen asserts that the researchers made an error analogous to the one that many people make when faced with the Monty Hall problem.

The long-running game show "Let's Make a Deal" debuted in December 1963 and ran until 1977. The famous Canadian host, Monty Hall, played one game in which the contestant was presented with three doors, numbered 1, 2 and 3.

Behind one of the doors was a fantastic prize, like a car, and behind the other two were booby prizes, like goats. After the contestant chose a door, but before the door was opened, Monty sometimes would have another door opened to expose a booby prize. Although Monty never allowed it, people have speculated about what a contestant should do if they were permitted to switch their choice to the other unopened door. In fact, thousands of letters were received by Parade magazine, including some from professional mathematicians, denouncing the assertion in the "Ask Marilyn" column that the contestant would be better off to switch. This probability problem has become known as the “Monty Hall problem”.

There are lots of simulations and explanations on the web. If you buy the book I co-authored, you can even create a simulation in Fathom.

Prove that you are human

2008-04-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

From the Top 10 Worst Captchas via Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day:

It reminds me of the aerobics in hell cartoon.

If it is on that popular video sharing site, it must be true

2008-04-01T04:44:00.000-07:00

Here is the video from the highly reputable BBC used to launch its iPlayer.

Web 3.0 - A kindler and gentler web experience

2008-03-31T05:25:00.000-07:00

This video found at the Inside CBC blog is droll, if not ROFL funny.

I could see using this is workshops with folks, like me, who don't really get social networking that much - being an anti-social fascist bastard and all.

Are you feeling competent?

2008-03-26T18:09:00.001-07:00

Beware, it may be a sign of incompetence. I have always suspected that the people who are dreadful communicators consider themselves skilled. I have come across some research to support this view.

Here is a quick sample:

Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find
They're blind to own failings, others' skills

Erica Goode, New York Times

Tuesday, January 18

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

``I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it,'' Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

See the full article at the San Francisco Chronicle.

This agrees with some of the research done at the Kawartha Pine Ridge DSB by OISE/UT. Struggling math students were shown fractions questions just long enough to form a judgment about whether they could get the correct solution. Generally, they were much more confident about their abilities to do fractions questions than their performance on such questions indicated. Boys were especially prone to over-estimate their competence (this comes as no surprise to my fifteen year-old daughter).

What do you think you are good at? Blogging? Presenting? Communicating? Problem-Solving? It may be evidence that you are hopeless.

Allegories about Arid Mathematics Teaching

2008-03-26T04:01:00.000-07:00

How is current mathematics teaching like teaching music without instruments or teaching art without using blank canvas? Find out by reading Paul Lockhart's Lament.

I found this on Vlorbik on Math Ed, where one of my posts was featured recently. You can also get a sense of how well it resonates with the Kitchen Table Math crowd. It also explains many of the challenges, including teacher content knowledge, that are being explored there.

A little shameless self-promotion

2008-03-21T04:14:00.000-07:00

Now that Amazon.com has accepted my edit, adding me as an author (yup - that's my name at the bottom), it is a good time to let you know that a book that I helped to write is available at the Key Press site.