Celtic Knots at COABE 2023!

Mark and I led a hybrid in-person/virtual presentation at the COABE conference in Atlanta, GA at the beginning of April. Since then, new people have joined our mailing list and a recent meeting on April 18th. We’re happy to have you as new members.

You can watch the recording of the meeting below. The padlet mentioned in the meeting (with links to Celtic knots and related tools) is here: https://bit.ly/CAMICOABE2023. Enjoy!

Billiards!

Today we looked at a problem involving rebounding balls on a billiard table.

The rules of our problem:

  • A “table” can have different dimensions (measurements of height and width).
  • A “ball,” modeled by a straight line, is launched at 45 degrees from the bottom left corner of a table.
The ball always starts on the bottom left and goes up towards the top right at 45 degrees
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Music and Polypad

We started this meeting with a warm-up question: What is something you are good at that you could teach someone else? It turned out we were a very talented group with skills ranging from kayaking to mountain climbing and from making enchiladas to reading and writing Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

We took some time on our own to explore some demonstrations of the new music and sound features of Mathigon Polypad. (To learn more, go to Using Polypad: Music – Mathigon.)

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Story Tables

In this meeting, Amy introduced the story table, which is a teaching tool for solving algebraic equations. Story tables allow us to use guess and check and then analyze patterns in the results, in order to find values of x that make equations true.

To get us started, Amy shared the following algebraic equation:

3x - 2 = 10

And asked us to tell the story of x. To find a solution in this story, Amy asked us for the moment not use other ways of solving equations.

Getting started with story tables
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What Comes Next?

Sarah and Eric have been teaching themselves how to code using Javascript, CSS, and HTML. The What Comes Next? game is the result of more than a year’s work. We are not fast coders! We used this meeting to share our game and to see if teachers might use it with their students.

To play the game: What Comes Next? 

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