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MathematicsGeometry: Flatland and Beyond Is time the fourth dimension? What would it be like to live in a world with only two dimensions? Welcome to Flatland, the two dimensional world from Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 math fiction novel. Learn Euclidean geometry principles and constructions (using only compass and straightedge) while you build a city where nothing has thickness – not even you! Then we'll contemplate a 1D community, where the world is a single line. Finally, looking across the border from our 3D life into the fourth dimension, we will gain a better picture of how we view the world.
Martian MathIt's back to the future with Martian Math. Travel through time to an era when humans travel to bases on Mars. Explore the geometry behind geodesic spheres and domes. Learn about our solar system, then get out your crystal ball and brainstorm about tomorrow. Take a big picture view and think like a futurist.
We’ll discover how the Internet works and is bringing our many cultures closer together and learn the story of unicode. We’ll poke around in Python, an important computer language that will help you learn math and science.
Math Quest: When Am I?
Use math to investigate history and increase your understanding of your place in time as you create a time table for planet Earth. We’ll work with mathematical concepts like powers and scientific notations, variables, negative numbers, fractions and decimals as we answer questions such as How long is your life compared to the age of the earth? How has population grown over time? How long ago did people first have computers, telephones, or the wheel, and how does our everyday existence compare to lives of people from the past?
Neolithic MathDiscover the roots of the original "Time Machine". We will explore the geometric, mathematical, and astronomical roots of our systems for measuring both time and space.
The first clock/calendar was an upright pole or post, the "Shadow Caster", which, over the course of the year revealed the cycles of daily, seasonal, and annual time. We will trace these ideas from classical Greece back through Babylonian and Sumerian times into the prehistoric or Neolithic past. The early Mesopotamians were master geometers skilled in surveying, architectural design, astronomy, astrology, and celestial navigation. They combined the 360 degree astrological calendar or Zodiac with the actual 365.25 day year, and came up with the brilliant idea of measuring both time and space with the same system of 360 days/degrees, 24 hours, 60 minutes & 60 seconds. We will construct a sundial and fixed compasses to derive these geometric principles, which are also the foundations of trigonometry and calculus as well as Platonic and Pythagorean theory.
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