It's Big. Big Green Chair is a big idea. It's intent is to gather and grow a community … keep reading
Learn to Program Artillery! V
For our last installment of Artillery, we will be adding a second player, formatting the angle and velocity inputs and keeping score of our hits. To start, lets reformat the input area of our webpage so that the text boxes line up. To do this we will … [Read more...]
What Can You Learn From Playing Lightbot?
If you haven't figured it out yet from previous posts, I am a programmer by trade. As such I have a keen interest in others learning to code at one level or another. Lightbot teaches some of the fundamental thought processes that programmers use on a … [Read more...]
Reading, the Imagination and Costume Play
This spring the world was taken captivate by the colorful paper dresses of a four year old girl named Mayhem. In a short period of time her following on Instagram grew from a few hundred to almost four hundred thousand. Many things converged to create … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! IV
For this installment of Artillery, we will add a cannon and a target and randomize the locations in which they are rendered. We will also randomize the mountain and give it a slightly smoother look. Let’s start by adding the cannon and target images … [Read more...]
Andrew Wiles, Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Capturing the Imagination on Pi Day
Happy Pi Day! All around the world today events will be held to celebrate the constant π- for fun and to promote interest in mathematics. We celebrate with the same goal in mind - promoting an interest in mathematics, but we do so through a story. So go … [Read more...]
Learn Place Value by Playing War
Learning place value can sometimes be a challenge for young math students. This is because they are moving from a concrete counting system of objects that they can manipulate or can imagine manipulating to a counting system that is bigger than their … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! III
For this installment of Artillery, we will add collision detection and an image indicating where the projectile impacted. Collision detection is simply measuring where our projectile lands and determining if some other object, like the ground or a … [Read more...]
Thoughts on Miquon, Mental Math, and Math Facts
For the elementary years in our homeschool we use an math program called Miquon which is a Montessori based curriculum. We like Miquon because it builds a good foundation of mathematical concepts, strengthens skills of pattern recognition, and encourages … [Read more...]
Learn to Program Artillery! II
In our last post Learn to Program Artillery we left off with entering a velocity, an angle and the “Fire” button. The code would draw an arc on the screen based on these parameters. This time we will add a mountain to shoot over (or through until we do … [Read more...]
A Fresh Encouragement for Homeschooling In 2014
How is your homeschool year going? Did you plan out your entire year in July? Are you right on schedule - not even one page behind in the math book? I know that is not true in our school. We have the year planned, but are not on target - life has … [Read more...]