Second semester stuff for Centennial

Alright, I think I have this fixed now. What I'll try to do is post anything here that would be helpful to you at home, including links to some things and downloads of assignments.

Here are the worksheets from second semester.

Assignment 1
Assignment 2
Assignment 3

Friday was pretty disappointing because so few of you put the effort in to show me what you know about pyramids. That means that this week will have us revisiting pyramid and cone stuff, in addition to moving on. Oh, and there will be a quiz on Friday.

Assignment 6

Here is assignment six, which is a group of logic puzzles to introduce you to proofs and logic.

Past assignments

Here they are, the links to my old assignments. Just click on the name of each one.

Assignment 1

Group work 1.2

Assignment 2

Assignment 4

Assignment 5

Syllabus

A few things for my new students and parents

This is a rough draft of the syllabus I'll be giving to my students.

This is a rough draft of one version of the introductory letter I want to give to my new students and their parents.

This is the other version of that letter.

Fractals, in pictures

Since you have a chance to look at websites about fractals, I thought it would be a good idea to get you interested in them. Fractals occur in nature, are studied by scientists, and are viewed as art.



This is someone's computer-generated fractal art. Look for repeating patterns.







Here is a fractal made out of Legos by Tony Roberts, a math professor at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia.








This is the Koch flake, a popular example of what some people call "classical fractals." The Repeating patterns are pretty easy to see.










This is a picture of the plant Romanesco, which some people call Broccoflower. If you look on the top you will see a beautiful fractal design.






This leaf shows another example of fractals occuring in nature. If you look at the lines that have been drawn on you can see three different scales of the same fractal.



For more information on fractals you can go to this website, and then check out some of the links I have up.

Some resources for future geometry projects

Here are a bunch of sites that you might find interesting. Some of them might seem a little over your head right now, but those ones are still fun websites to play around on and will hopefully get you excited for math possibilities in the future.

This website is called "African Fractals." It has links to other websites about how fractals have been used in African cultures. Fractals are geometric objects made up of some pattern that is decreasing in size.

This website is about cornrows. It shows one of the specific ways that fractals have been used in African culture. There is a lot of cool stuff here, including sections that teach you how to braid, some that tell you about the history of corn rows, and a program that uses fractals to design the cornrows.

Here is another website involving the always cool fractal. On this one it is best to read some of the directions on the right side, but then there is some great stuff to play around with.

This is the last fractal website. I promise. This one shows you a fractal growth model and lets you see some of the specifics about what is happening on the screen. Again, pretty cool.

This is a list of links to some cool stories in the history of math. You may even find some of the other sites I've already listed on here.

This is the first site listed about Sangaku. At this site you read a little about Sangaku and look at some farily simple Sangaku problems.

This is the second Sangaku website. This one has cooler pictures and harder problems.

This website is called "Counting to Infinity." It's about some of the weird things that happen with infinity.

The retirement of my father

My dad just retired from the Oregon State Police. Which is really cool for him. Here is the story from the local paper, and here's the picture they ran.