Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Tonight's After Dinner Conversation: Algorithms


Life at the "next level" continues. Dan flipped his butcher paper (and R10 and I discussed that we do need the white board at this rate...)

It all started with a simple suggestion. Why not work on an algorithm for the NXT robot. Today the team programmers (for our FLL team) were becoming successful with a "follow the black line" program. Dan suggested E12 think on it a bit more...get the robot to do whatever black line it comes across using the same algorithm.

What followed was a reminder and discussion about algorithms. R10 kept right up with them and even let her brother know she in fact did know about negative numbers and certainly enough to understand this conversation. Love that girl.

What took place after that was a long discussion and teaching moment on functions- in particular linear functions and eventually the parabola. Indeed.

Scary part? By the end, E12 was giving Dan the equations correctly that you see up there. This went on for at least 45 minutes probably closer to an hour.I'm not sure Dan will allow me to blog all of them, but I simply could not resist this one. 45+ minutes on mathematical functions. The two of them were pure synergy. I had to share.

So FYI, I think Algebra has already started.

3 comments:

jen said...

Oh girl you lost me??? I have no clue what you are talking about on this. I can say im so proud of you kids to have mind to do that. Good job!!!

Fairly local said...

I only understood the part about getting a white board.

Heather said...

hahaha Tracey! Honestly, I actually remember a lot about graphing functions...

Now why anyone would ever use this in real life I never really got so it's been interesting to see that from an engineer's point of view!