I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Talking about the book: mini-course for parents

We are talking with many people about math ed.

When it comes to math and children, what do you want? What are your dreams? 

This is what we ask. It gives people pause; it brings out passions. And then other questions come up – because what people want tends to be very, very far away from the current reality.

The questions start pouring in. How do I start? What resources should I use and where do I find them? Is my dream even possible? Has anyone done it before and succeeded?

One thing became clear in these conversations. Yes, online hubs like our Q&A platform help, especially when you have a specific question or two. For example, this Monday, Malke the math dancer wondered if attributes of dance constitute variables, and if we are doing algebra while choreographing. But someone who is just starting out is likely to have dozens of questions all at once. Or they might not have any questions because the subject is so new and overwhelming.

People want and need small, active support groups that can share dreams, brainstorm plans, and make things happen. Moreover, this brave undertaking has to be reasonably casual.

As a member of the National Association of Math Circles board, I often get into discussions of why don’t we have more Math Circles. I think I know why. Because too many people conceptualize Math Circles as hardcore endeavors that require the support of a university or a big corporation, and a highly educated leader working a gazillion hours a week to prepare and implement activities.

The model we are developing only requires a few interested people: a couple of parents whose kids are friends, a small homeschool coop, or a playgroup. Our pilot to test the model will be a mini-course online. The goal is to help participants start a local math playgroup or informal club. We think of the course as a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course), not because we want it large, but because it feels open and connected.

If you think you may want to start a math playgroup, and to participate in a course that will help, drop me a line!

Doing good: reasons people pay for the Moebius Noodles PDF

Our book has the open Creative Commons license, and is available as a download where people name their own price: http://www.moebiusnoodles.com/TheBook Some people download for free, which is great. We are very happy about the sales. We sell about the same number of digital files as we do paper books. People have good reasons to pay, and to name fair prices! So, people pay to…

• …Support further Moebius Noodles projects
• …Express appreciation of the art and content of the book
• …Feed the authors of the project
• …Be a hero of quality mathematics education
• …Share math all around the world (we get a much more international crowd for electronic sales)
• …Help to prove that open access and open licences are good ideas

All these reasons work! The Moebius Noodles team feels supported, and is doing more projects, like the parent course. Other excellent math authors are already working with us on more advanced young math booklets, which will also be available under open licenses. Other authors join in making their existing projects open, such as Don Cohen’s “Calculus for 7 year olds” and “Map to Calculus.” Volunteer teams are translating Moebius Noodles into Spanish, Persian, Russian, and Hebrew at a crowd-translation platform: http://crowdin.net/project/MoebiusNoodles We use CrowdIn for free, because we are a Creative Commons project. Email me if you want to start another language.

Thank you for your continuing support! Our math love to you!

Blogs and networking

Unschooling Lifestyle is celebrating the name “Moebius Noodles” with some Mobius Strip activities and resources, such as Vi Hart’s story “Wind and Mr. Ug.”

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Michael Kelly is chatting with us on Facebook about the Fibonacci Day 5/8/13.

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At her “Math Mama Writes” blog, Sue VanHattum talks about the role of Creative Commons open licence in decisions to read and to buy books. Here are some comments on the post. The first one refers to our note by the “Download PDF” button: “You choose how much you want to pay, and type the number here. Support Moebius Noodles as you can, from zero to infinity!”

Denise Gaskins:
I wonder how they would process a payment of “infinity” for the pdf…

Butterfly:
What a brilliant book! I have just devoured the PDF and am eager to buy the hard copy … just deciding how many copies

Denise Gaskins:
How many copies: Our church has a lot of young couples, so I plan to buy a copy for every new baby shower. In fact, I wish I had enough spare money to get one for every kid in the nursery now…

In the next few days, we will be adding an option for groups to save on shipping when they order multiple copies. I know it is welcome news for learning coops, math circles, and simply groups of friends who want to do math together. Right now buying an extra copy saves almost four dollars on shipping.

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In related news, we greatly simplified the PDF download based on the comments of Vlad Kuznetsov on Facebook. Now it’s quicker and easier – thanks Vlad!

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Here is our crowdfunder Dor Abrahamson, giving his Supporter Certificate a visual “Like!” Send us photos of kids, friends and colleagues enjoying the book or playing math games from it!

Sharing

You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com

More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA

Talk to you again on May 30th!

Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova

I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Book news

This week, the paper books will be on the way to the crowdfunder supporters and to the first buyers. I am happy with the quality of the paper, the binding, and the colors. Yes, it is great to hold this object, this physical book in your hand! Once the book arrives, please send us photos of yourselves and your kids enjoying it. We are starting a collection!

There are two translation efforts under way: Russian and Persian. If you are interested in translating the book into your language, please let me know.

We are starting to meet with parent, educator, and techie groups interested in implementing the book ideas and more. There is much hunger for advanced, playful math that children make for themselves – following their unique dreams and needs. We are working on support systems for people who pledge to this cause, so we can meet one another, and find as much resources and encouragement as needed to help the children. Everywhere we bring these ideas, there are offers of support from parents, educators, and business leaders.

If you would like us to meet with parents in your learning coop or playgroup, in person or online, let me know!

Blogs and networking

We had to make a mirror for the site, because the traffic exceeded limits several times in the last weeks. Welcome, new friends and colleagues!

Math Forum at Drexel, one of the oldest and largest math educator hubs online, included news of the Moebius Noodles book launch in its April newsletter. This is the feature icon they gave us:

It has a dragon curve on it – quite appropriate for the adventurous math! The dragon curve also goes well with our chapter on fractals. You can use it to make up other roleplaying fractal curves.

Moebius Noodles had a guest post at the Scientific American’s blog on raising science-literate kids. Here is the beginning of the post:

Children dream big. They crave exciting and beautiful adventures and they love to pretend-play. Just ask them who they want to be when they grow up. The answers will run the gamut from astronauts to zoologists and from ballerinas to Jedi masters. So how come children don’t dream of becoming mathematicians?

Kids don’t dream of becoming mathematicians because they already are mathematicians. Children have more imagination than it takes to do differential calculus. They are frequently all too literate like logicians and precise like set theorists. They are persistent, fascinated with strange outcomes and are out to explore the “what-if” scenarios. These are the qualities of good mathematicians!

Sharing

You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com

More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA

Talk to you again on May 15th!

Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova

I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

BIG NEWS!

This week, I am a believer in the goodness of the Universe, and in the power of the people: “Where there is a will, there is a way!” Hundreds of parents, mathematicians, and educators gave advice, tested games with their kids, shared stories and ideas, debugged the math, crowdfunded the project, helped to spread the word, and cheered one another on.

And finally, the Moebius Noodles book – your book – is here! THANK YOU!

Reviewers say the book is beautiful, smart, and meaningful. I am in love too! It also has an open license, so you are welcome to remix the games, translate the book into other languages, and show the book to friends and colleagues. You can preview pages, buy the paperback or download the PDF here: http://www.moebiusnoodles.com/TheBook Please spread the word!

For supporters who crowdfunded the project: your copies of Moebius Noodles will be on the way within the next few weeks.

What is next? First and foremost, we will be helping more and more people to play adventurous Moebius Noodles math with their kids, and to discuss it with like-minded grown-ups. That will be the goal of virtual and physical book tours, workshops, and events. At the same time, we will be working on other authoring projects inspired by the success of the first one.

Available now:

• Question and answer hub about young math http://ask.moebiusnoodles.com/index.html

Coming soon:

• James Tanton and the Moebius Noodles crew adapt ten powerful problem-solving techniques for toddlers and young kids
• Oleg Gleizer and Olga Radko use the Moebius Noodles co-creation process to make a booklet on combinatorics (Young diagrams)
• A large group (anonymous for now) puts together a collection of calculus games, fables and jokes (short-hand abstractions) accessible to five-year-olds

Join us for more adventurous math for the playground crowd!

Sharing

You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com

More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA

Talk to you again on April 30th!

Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova

Is 2*3 different from 3*2? My answer used to be “But of course! Don’t you know the commutative property?” Now, after following Malke Rosenfeld’s exploration of multiplication, I answer it with a lot more non-committal “it depends“. And I notice more and more examples when even though quantitatively, 3*2=2*3 and 8*1=1*8 and 3*5=5*3, qualitatively you sometimes get two distinctly different results.

Ironically, as I’m moving from quantity toward quality, my 6-year old is moving in the opposite direction. Consider these two examples:

Remember Maria’s review of Clap, Drum and Shake It by Marcia Daft? In particular, this part:

Do more multiplication. In particular, invite kids to multiply within pattern units. For example, how do you double the pattern unit “clap, clap, shake”? That is, how do you show 3×2 in the language of the book? “Clap, clap, shake; clap, clap, shake” is what the book does. You can also do “clap, clap, clap, clap, shake, shake”!

Two months ago I tried it with my son using 3 colors of PostIt notes instead of printed cards. He concentrated on the qualitative aspect (the patterns) rather than on the quantitative side (6 elements total) and insisted that the two strings had nothing in common.

Me: “But you said this one had 6 PostIts and the other one had 6 PostIts”.

Him: “But these are not the same 6s, Mom.”

Yesterday we finished listening to “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” audio book. After giving the story some thought, my son asked me: “Do you know what it’d be if there were two Chitty Chittys?” He then explained that it’d be “Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang Bang”. He then went on to tell me what three Chitty Chittys would be like. You guessed it: “Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang”.

Me: Can two also be “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?”

Him:”Sure because you know, Mom, it’s the same thing”.

Which reminds me of a story we recently re-read. It was a chapter from the Karlson on the Roof by Astrid Lindgren. In it, a little boy says that he will have one birthday cake with eight candles on it (1*8); to which his friend adds that it would be a whole lot better to have eight cakes with one candle (8*1).

It also reminds me of a video in which Malke’s daughter is sharing her perspective on the quality vs. quantity issue.

What do you think? Share your examples of when you’d rather have a*b than b*a.

Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Book news

We are polishing the book landing page. It will have a short Moebius Noodles declaration of principles, previews of pages, quotes from reviews, and so on. We need to find a balance between greeting newbies first coming upon Moebius Noodles – and displaying photos, questions and answers, and game ideas from people already involved with the project.

The book is a beginning. It is an invitation to join the Moebius Noodles movement!

How do you join? Questions are at the heart of learning mathematics. To join Moebius Noodles movement, ask a question!

The powerful enterprise software for questions and answers is provided to Moebius Noodles by DZone, a publisher and a community of software developers. The leaders of DZone believe in supporting excellent mathematics education for the next generation of technologists.

Blogs and networks

Math Goggles #9 invites you to seek math in your child’s favorite cartoons:

This week’s Math Goggles challenge is very simple – watch one of your child’s favorite cartoons and look for math in it. If it seems interesting, intriguing, strange, weird, and worth investigating, look further into it. Yep, that’s it! Here’s how it worked out for me…

Math Goggles #10 is a series of challenges about slicing bagels. It starts simple: can you slice into two pieces? Can you slice so that the cross-section is two circles? Then it gets involved, all the way to trefoil knots and mobius strips.

David Coffey started a meme on making every day mathematically special. Try it with your kids! Ask them for their favorite numbers, and celebrate when those days come up. Our examples are on the blog; here’s one for today, 3/30:

Sharing

You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com

More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA

Talk to you again on April 15th!

Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova

Of course, I was drawn to the part of the exhibit that focused on movement and dance as one of the “hundred languages” with which children express themselves.  There was a video that showed the children’s first experiences with an old factory space – a huge room empty except for two rows of large, white columns.  The children were running around and between the columns, peeking around them, and interacting with their friends, all movements and ideas that eventually turned into a formal piece of choreography.

At the time I was just starting to think about creating a math/dance program for preschoolers and my biggest question was how could I encourage that kind of exploration?   It seemed unlikely I would be able to find an empty factory or other interesting environment and get a bunch of preschoolers there on a weekly basis.  And then it hit me – I could create an environment out of tape.  I could define three-dimensional space using two-dimensional lines and colors.

After experimenting with my daughter’s preschool class, I came up with some starting points for parents and teachers who are interested in employing tape in the interest of math and kinesthetic exploration of space.

A simple straight line taped down a hallway becomes a pathway.  It also divides the space in two, and provides a chance to walk on it or jump over it.  Best of all, one can march (or walk, or skip, or slide, etc.) rhythmically down it singing “As I was marching down the street, down the street, down the street…”  Or, tape two or more parallel lines down a space and see what happens when you sing “Down by the banks of the hankey pankey, when the bullfrogs jump from bank to bankey…”

A simple alteration of a child’s environment can deepen their experience and exploration of the space around them.  When my daughter was three her teachers put down a straight line of tape to help the class ‘line up’ before leaving the classroom.  It was a simple, visual learning strategy that appeared to work as envisioned by the teachers.  Later in the year though, I saw pictures of what else the kids had done with the line.  They had used their large blocks to build a wall the length of the tape and then lined up their animals and cars alongside it.   

A simple taped perimeter can highlight empty space, as in “Find an empty spot inside the tape and make a shape.”  Floor tape can define and redefine the space it’s in.  Large open spaces encourage a lot of endless running.  The minute you create a large rectangular box on the floor, with corners, you now have enough visual cues to focus a preschooler’s attention to IN (the box), OUT (of the box), AROUND (the sides of the box), CORNERS, and ACROSS, all age-appropriate math terminology.

Ultimately, I would love if every parent or preschool teacher would put down taped lines in their living and learning spaces then stand back to observe how the children interact with them.

Start with one straight line and go from there but don’t bring attention to it.  Let your kids find it and interact with it on their own volition and let us know what you observe!

p.s. FYI, when I talk about ‘floor tape’ I am referring to two different products, both of them sticky.  First, there’s painters tape which is blue and low tack so it can come up easily off both hard surfaces and carpet. There is also the floor tape that P.E. teachers use, which comes in lots of fabulous colors, the better to design with, my dear.  

This week’s Math Goggles challenge is a perfect excuse to go out and buy a dozen of freshly baked bagels. At least it was for me. (If you are not sure what is a Math Goggles challenge, read about it here). So the question is what do you get when you slice a bagel.

The answer depends on how you slice it. That’s one reason you need several bagels. Begin by cutting the first bagel horizontally. What will the cross section look like when you finish slicing?  Easy, right?

Next bagel! Instead of making a horizontal cut, slice this one in half vertically. Can you predict what the cross section will look like this time? Still easy-peasy! (And now you know the correct answer next time you see this little puzzle floating around on Facebook)

Time for bagel #3, inspired by James Tanton. Can you slice it in such a way (different from the first two) that the cross section will show two circles? Hint: choose your best-looking (most torus-like) bagel for this one.

The forth bagel can be cut into a trefoil knot which is super easy to do, but you sacrifice the ability to toast your bagel before putting cream cheese on, or rather in, it.

Four down, eight more to go. Time for the big one, George Hart’s interlocking bagel halves puzzle. I made a mistake of putting half my bagels into the freezer, so by the time I attempted this problem, I only had 2 bagels left. And I didn’t want to draw on any of them with a Sharpie. Let’s just say that I learned a few valuable lessons in the process and ended up with a failed, but perfectly edible experiment.

So, sharpen your knife, get out a tub of cream cheese, and keep your eyes open for math!

David Coffey started a meme on making every day mathematically special. Try it with your kids! Ask them for their favorite numbers, and celebrate when those days come up.

You can use a sign generator, or simply write on paper and put that sign up in your house. I made a few signs for upcoming dates, using some of my favorite math tidbits: composite numbers, Fibonacci sequence and plain old multiplication.

This week’s Math Goggles challenge is very simple – watch one of your child’s favorite cartoons and look for math in it. If it seems interesting, intriguing, strange, weird, and worth investigating, look further into it. Yep, that’s it! Here’s how it worked out for me.

My child’s most favorite cartoon of the moment is called Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers. I like it, but not enough to sit through all 88 minutes of it every other day. Still, I overhear snippets of dialogue as I go about doing my own things. One of the snippets that caught my attention was a trick question from the Troll Warrior to Clutch Powers:

Troll Warrior: Using nothing but standard eight-stud bricks, how many bricks would it take to build a spiral staircase as tall as three minifigs?

Clutch Powers: There are more than 915 million ways to combine standard LEGO bricks. But they will never connect on the diagonal.

Really? I mean, I understand the impossibility of connecting on the diagonal (had to explain it to my son a few times before), but 915 million combinations?! This sounds pretty amazing.

Turns out, the story is even more amazing than it sounds. The 915 million figure, or more precisely, 915 103 765, is the number of unique ways to combine just six two-by-four studded LEGO bricks of the same color. If this sounds unbelievable, check out the explanation of the LEGO Counting Problem. It is a great read and has just one formula that’s pretty easy to understand.

One of the best parts of the paper is in the “Why is this interesting?” section:

Such challenges are always important to drive mathematical research, and it often happens that methods developed to study a problem with no practical applications (like this one) are useful to study problems which do have an impact on everyday life.

Back to the original question of building a spiral staircase out of LEGOs… This is when the second part of my challenge started. And let me tell you, I totally cheated by looking at… my 6-year old’s recent builds.

He recently built a 3D treasure map using some unit blocks and LEGO bricks, complete with the “X marks the spot” signs which he made out of LEGOs, of course. That’s how I knew that, under some conditions, regular LEGO studs and plates can intersect at angles other than 90 degrees. So I used this idea and built a very basic spiral staircase in no time although it does not follow the  ”use nothing but two-by-four studs” rule.

Now it is your turn to find math in your child’s favorite cartoon!

Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Book news

This week, we had the thrill of holding the full file of the book in front of our eyes. The front and back cover, Library of Congress and ISBN numbers, Table of Contents, everything! It was so tempting to rush the book to you right then! But we had to follow the plan for another round of quality assurance, with multiple people checking and re-checking everything. More than thirty corrections of layout, text-illustration correspondences, and typos later, the book is going to the printers and the ePub formatting. We will have to check on the printer’s proofs, as well. Like Zeno’s arrow, “Moebius Noodles” is approaching the error-free state. No book ever gets there, but we’ll get close enough for all practical purposes!

Meanwhile, here are three of many stages of our back cover design: the finished look with 3D models of the real opened book; the first schematic of the layout; and an early draft. The back cover is a diagram of how to navigate through the book. We thought it would be a bit more useful than the advance praise you traditionally find on back covers, which we love too, by the way. We will be aggregating reviews online.

Blogs and networks

Sol Lederman interviewed Maria Droujkova for his Inspired by Math series on notable modern mathematicians and mathematics educators. Why is there so much computer science in the “Moebius Noodles” book? What is math literacy? What is Maria’s secret plan for taking over the world? Listen to the podcast and find out!

Our Spanish-speaking readers will enjoy math videos by our book illustrator, Ever Salazar. But math is a universal language! Check out what Mary O’Keeffe (Albany Math Circle) is doing, after having found the videos via the Moebius Noodles Facebook page:

Thanks to Maria Droujkova for bringing this wondrous, brilliant, and engaging series of math videos in Spanish to my attention! It is a terrific way for me to pick up at least a little bit of mathematical Spanish before my trip to lead activities at a math festival in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico this weekend.

Math Goggles issue #7 is inspired by Keith Devlin’s MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) on mathematical thinking. It is about the ambiguity of our language, with examples from newspapers, such as “Teen found after ski slope disappearance” (where did the slope go?).

Math Goggles #8 invites you to make puzzles using LEGO and other 3D tools.

Find a math and logic puzzle that you’ve not seen or solved before. Now, build it with whatever it is you have handy – cardboard, wrapping paper and glue; modeling clay; marshmallows and toothpicks; building blocks. You might like the challenge of recreating a pen-and-paper puzzle with 3-dimensional objects. Or you might like the idea of taking a 3D puzzle and drawing it.

Sharing

You are welcome to share the contents of this newsletter online or in print. You can also remix and tweak anything here as you wish, as long as you share your creations on the same terms. Please credit MoebiusNoodles.com

More formally, we distribute all Moebius Noodles content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: CC BY-NC-SA

Talk to you again on March 30th!

Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova