Day: May 6, 2017

Keeping it in proportion

by dougpete, posted in Computers, Education, learning, Mathematics, Teaching

I’m constantly amazed with the amount of wonderful learning you can enjoy if you follow the right people.  For my This Week in Ontario Edublogs post, I had tagged this post from Matthew Oldridge for inclusion.  As it turns out, I enjoyed it so much and played around with a resource that he shared, I felt that I would do it better justice to have it sit as a post on its own.

So, the post was “Estimation and Orders of Magnitude“.

I love the concept of Estimation and I know that we all use it daily.  If you’re going to make a trip – to work, to the store, to the coffee shop, around the block, etc. you’re usually estimating the distance and the time that it will take to get there.  Or, if you’re making coffee for a number of different guests, how many cups to make?  Or how long until you need to get more gas. Or how many steps to get to the next floor.  Or how many tiles does it take to tile the room.

For the purposes of this post, Matthew is talking about estimating the number of centicubes that it would take to fill a classroom.  He’s talking millions, billions, trillions, …  The next logical step would be to move to different sized classrooms, the gymnasium, a storage closet, and any other location within the school.  I think it’s a great concept.

In the middle of the post, he makes reference to a web and app resource, “The Scale of the Universe 2“.

It was here that I lost focus and immersed myself in the content.

It really is a wonderful place to explore relative sizes of things.

Notice the relative size in the bottom right corner!

But it’s so interesting to use the scrubber bar at the bottom and move to different sizes.  Once I understood the concept, I found myself using the scrubber as a number line and guessing what the next image up the scale might be.  And, of course, the extremes at either end have to be checked out.

There are so many uses that come to mind with this.  Even just clicking on an object to get its details is fun.

So, hats off to Matthew for letting me know about this resource. Take some time today to enjoy it yourself.

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OTR Links 05/06/2017

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.