Curriculum Resource: Folding Circles for Pi Day

Today is Pi Day (March 14, or 3.14).  Of course, we celebrated with our traditional Pizza Pi(e)s.  But because Google informed me it was also the 101st birthday of Akira Yoshizawa, who is considered the grandfather of origami (see below):



I went searching for origami and circles, and chanced upon this wonderful website, WholeMovement.com.  The author, Bradford Hansen-Smith, inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller, has compiled tons of information about all the mathematical  and other concepts one can learn by folding circles.  It doesn't take fancy equipment--he starts with paper plates and bobby pins--but it can take you deep into mathematical and geometric concepts.

So a great way to observe Pi Day (besides eating pie, pizza or otherwise) is to check out his website.

Win $50,000 in the Google Science Fair

Do you know any teenagers (13-18) working on an awesome science project of their own design?  If so, you may want to encourage them to enter it in the Google Science Fair, an international online science competition sponsored by Google in partnership with CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific America.

The Google Science Fair follows the same basic rules and procedures as a physical science fair, but students must go the extra step of presenting their work through videos and other digital means (another good skill to be developing).  Students from public, private, or home schools around the world can compete in the three age categories of 13-14, 15-16, and 17-18.  There will be 15 global finalists who will be flown to a physical competition event at Google headquarters in July.  The finalist winners in each age category are awarded a $25,000 scholarship and the opportunity to engage in a high level science research experience, while the Grand Prize winner will get a $50,000 and a National Geographic scientific expedition to the Galapagos.  There is also a $50,000 prize for the Science in Action winner, the project that best addresses a social, environmental, or health issue in a way that makes a difference in the lives of a group or community.

For more information or to sign up, visit the Google Science Fair website.  However, projects are due by April 1, 2012, so your student scientists will have to submit their work soon.

For an inspirational video Google produced encouraging student science, click below:

And to hear more about the rules of the competition, watch the following video:

What Happened to Wikipedia and Google?

I'm frequently writing about Google Doodles in this blog.  But today's Google "Doodle" is different than any before, at least as far as I know.  Today the famous logo does not appear at all, but rather is blacked out by a big black box.  However, at least that popular student resource is working.  If students go to the English site of Wikipedia, they will discover that it is down for 24 hours.  In its place is a short protest against two pieces of legislation and a request, complete with links to contact your representatives (according to the zip code you enter) and then tweet about it or post it on your Facebook page, to express your opposition to the bills.

The legislation in question is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).  The goals of both these acts is to protect US intellectual property, primarily from foreign sources that are selling it as their own.  The main supporters of the bills have been Hollywood and other entertainment producers who are trying to shut down foreign bootleggers of commercial media, such as illegal downloads or DVDs of US films and TV shows, music, etc.

So the goal is something that I think most of us would support.  People shouldn't be making money by providing us with illegal copies of performances they don't own and that the performers themselves don't make any money for, right?

The issue that many Internet-based companies, and many of their customers, have is that these bills address the problem not by going after the illegal producers themselves, but the sources that give these illegal producers access to American consumers online.  So, rather than suing or arresting the bootleggers, SOPA and PIPA allow the producers to take action against anyone who provides services or even has links to the illegal websites and demand that they block any US access to this site.

Many in the online community have major issues with this approach.  Some consider this approach to be censorship, which they vehemently oppose in any form, despite the reason.  Others argue that the legislation as written is overly broad and would impose onerous burdens on even the smallest Internet companies. Yet others say that this is just the wrong way to address the problem of intellectual privacy.  As Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit (another online resource that has gone dark for the day), says about this legislation, "It's like taking action against Ford (Motor Company) because a Mustang (car) was used in a bank robbery."  Reddit has a lot of educational information about this issue (albeit more anti-legislation than pro) as does the SOPA Strike website.

So as much as we might hate losing our Wikipedia (along with lots of other informational sites) for the day, this is a great opportunity for discussing with your children or students some of these issues, such as the downside of everyone (including criminals) being able to access everyone in the world, and what is the best way to deal with problems like this.  (Besides, only the English site of Wikipedia is down, so you can search in a different language and work on your translation skills along with researching the subject.)

And if you think your students will use this as an excuse to play games rather than do their research on the Internet, don't worry--MineCraft is one of the sites that has joined the blockout.

Getting the Most from Your Google Searches

I don't know about you, but I would be lost without Google.  I truly can't imagine what it was like for parents to homeschool before Google and the World Wide Web.  And my son has grown up with an idea of Google as an omnipotent information source.  I think he was only five when, after asking me one of those questions that has been pondered for ages (like "which came first, the chicken or the egg?"), he responded to my answer that I didn't know with a sigh and a disgusted face and said, "Mom, just Google it."

That said, I've only recently realized how much I had been missing about how to use this powerful tool.  Here are a few of the features that I've only learned about lately:

• Did you know you could use Google as a calculator? It serves as an advanced math calculator, in fact, since it can give you the answer to math equations with symbols that I've long ago forgotten what they stand for.  
• Did you know that they have a special search engine, called Google Scholar, that is geared to searching through scholarly literature?  This search engine attempts to rank the responses to your quest the way an academic researcher would--that is, looking not only at the text of the article, but weighing factors such as the author, where it was published, and how many times it had been cited in other scholarly journals, before ordering the responses to your search request.
• Did you know that if you are looking for something within a particular website, but it doesn't have its own internal search engine, you can make Google do a site-specific search?
• Did you know you could use Google to give you conversions, like changing dollars into English pounds, or degrees Farenheit into degree Centigrade, or other metric conversions of distance and weight?
• Did you know you could use Google as a dictionary?

Well, maybe you did, but I didn't.  But Google Education is here to the rescue!  They have recently developed a series of posters for teachers to post in the classroom to educate students about search engine terminology, symbols, and best practices.   You can download them here, and even if you don't print them out as posters, you can keep the documents on your computer when you need a quick reminder about how to search for, say, Martin Luther King Jr. quotes ONLY during the Kennedy Administration, or gathering information about twilight without venturing into vampire territory.

Art Competition: Doodle 4 Google

Google is running an art competition that will result in some K-12 student having his or her design as the logo for the Google home page for one entire day! Entitled "Doodle 4 Google" ("Doodle" being the name Google gives for the specialized adaptations of its corporate logo that are displayed for special days on its home page), a panel of celebrity judges will select up to two designs from each of four age groups from each state (with Washington DC students competing with the Maryland students). The four age groups are Grades K-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12, so high schoolers are definitely invited to participate. Also, the contest rules specifically state that homeschooled students are eligible to compete. The design should illustrate the theme, "What I'd like to do someday...."

Besides having her/his work displayed on the Google home page for a day, the National Winner will receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop and digital drawing tablet, and a tee shirt printed with the winning design. The three National Finalists (one of whom came from North Carolina last year) each get a $5,000 college scholarship, a digital drawing tablet, and a tee shirt of their design. There will be 40 Regional Finalists who will all be sent to New York to participate in an event to honor their artwork.

To enter, students must register by March 2, 2011, and have their artwork postmarked by March 16, 2011. There will be an online vote by the public on May 4-13, so even if you don't enter, you can help select the ultimate winner.

For complete details, see the contest web page here.

As I've stated in earlier contest announcements, let us know if any of our reader families enters, especially if you end up as a finalist. We would love to see, and maybe even get to vote for, your artwork!