Mathematical Poetry Blog

I set up a RSS feed, using blogsearch.google.com, of new pages that reference The Geometer's Sketchpad. The first useful result is from a blog about Mathematical Poetry. The blog is featuring artistic works currently and mentions one mathematical artist's use of Sketchpad.

Here is one fascinating example of Mathematical Poetry from an earlier post:

My first Flash Game

This is Dropball!

What is the role of memory in schools?

Father Guido reflects...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

What is the machine?
A great video to describe the shift in thinking that comes with Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 Tools

I am spending the day with Will Richardson exploring some Web 2.0 tools.

Among the neatest things have been

• Google Reader where RSS feeds can be aggregated including
• other people's blogs
• google blog search
• people's del.icio.us tagged links
• photos from flickr e.g. html://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/math
• videos from youtube etc.

Tim Hawes shared a site with tutorials in plain English for these tools.

John Taylor found an interesting Adobe Connect Video

Yet Another Computer Algebra System

I have been exploring Yacas for a little while now. It is extremely powerful and is free. Students can download it or run it directly from its web site. There is an interactive tutorial available from the main set of tabs.

On the related links page, there is a link to mavscript, which uses yacas to perform calculations directly in text or OpenOffice Text documents. Maybe I am a geek, but being able to differentiate, graph and factor directly inside a text document warmed a cockle in my heart!

Flash Graphing Tools

As part of the CLIPs project, we have been developing learning objects in Flash to support work in the Grade 11 Functions courses. Fortuitously, we came across a set of robust tools created by Doug Ensley, Shippensburg University and Barbara Kaskosz , University of Rhode Island, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, which include fantastic documentation. We have learned a lot about programming in Flash by using the tools.

There has been some functionality that we wanted to add, including labeling of axes and adding control points to graphs that necessitated creating our own version of the classes. Examples of our work and the original examples are available here.