G/T Camp 2016

My school-aged children went to this year's Gifted and Talented Summer Camp held in Howard County. They were in different tracks and so had different experiences.

My daughter was in "Talking Tangrams" which blended learning about folk tales with craftily creating characters out of tangrams. The folk tales came from countries all over the world and included the challenge of recreating characters in the stories.

Cuban myth

The final project was two-fold: narrating a folk tale for presentation to parents on the last day and creating an original folk tale with tangram figures. My daughter wrote the tale of a duck whose garden is attacked by a naughty rabbit. Other animals come to the rescue at the end.

Cover of my daughter's book

The villain!

One of many victims

My son was in the "Math Patterns and Problem Solving." That course included solving pre-algebra problems as well as playing a variety of mathematical games. The range of games ran from Sudoku and Kenken to the popular card games Set and Swish.

Sudoku in progress

Kenken complete

Demonstrating Swish

Playing Swish

He also worked on geometric puzzles, such as creating a mirror image.

Hand drawn

Our youngest son came on the last day and wanted to join in the fun!

Climbing to new heights in academia!

Cute Kids Pix and Stories January 2016

More pics that didn't make their own blog post!

The month started naturally with New Year's Eve. My eight-year old wanted to be woken up to celebrate the change of the year. He asked mommy and his sister. They opted to record a video of shouting "Happy New Year!" which he and I dutifully played back at just the right time.

Watching Times Square on the computer and mommy on the iPad

For math homework, my son had to write a word problem to express three times ten. He wrote, "I had an extremely small lego set. It had three bags, each with ten pieces. How many pieces are there?"

 The toddler spent a lot of time being cute.

Helping out in the kitchen

All done

Trying out a beard

Book Review: Secret Coders by Gene Luen Yang et al.

Secret Coders by Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes

12 year old girl Hopper has to go to a new school. She wants to fit in but it's a weird place. The main building looks like a haunted house and has the number nine all over it. Another building is padlocked shut. Creepy bird with four eyes perch in the trees. She tries to make friends with three boys but one accidentally gets pudding on her. To make things even, she spits on him. Of course, this is the beginning of their friendship. His name is Eni and he's been going to the school since kindergarten. He's always had the feeling that something is odd about the place. At lunch one of the birds notices Hopper's earrings shaped like the number seven. The bird opens three eyes. Eni thinks he knows what's going on with them. They are expressing numbers in binary code with their eyes (closed, open, open, open). This discovery starts them on the path to unravel the school's mysteries.

The graphic novel is pretty short but a nice introduction to the very basics of binary coding. The book even gives the readers (it seems like it's aimed at 12 year-olds) a chance to do some coding, making it both fun and educational. Sadly, the next book isn't scheduled to come out until August 2016, a very long wait.

Pi Day Celebration, National Cryptologic Museum

The National Cryptologic Museum hosted a Pi Day (March 14th which is close enough to 3.14) celebration and we couldn't resist going. The museum is rather plain on the outside but wonderful inside, full of all sorts of coding and decoding machines and other displays.

National Cryptologic Museum

On the way to the Pi Day room

One room had a wide variety of Pi-related crafts. If kids completed all the crafts, they'd get a special prize. L jumped in with full enthusiasm. She made a Pi bracelet with beads standing for the numbers in Pi.

L almost ready to craft

Another station had kids coloring a pie with the Pi symbol on it. L colored in the dessert and made the background blue, making it Pie in the Sky!

Pie coloring

Other tables used measuring for practical applications of Pi. At one, the fellow measured the circumference of L's head and then calculated the size of hat she would wear (which is measured by the distance from ear to ear straight through the head). Her hat size was 6 3/8 inches. We'll let industrious readers reverse the math (circumference divided by Pi equals diameter) to find out how big L's head is around.

At another table L measured the rim of a coffee cup with a string. She cut the string to have a piece equal to the circumference. She then cut the string when into pieces using the diameter of the cup, i.e. across the top of the cup. She got three pieces of string, the last one a little longer than the others, representing 3.1415etc.!

Pi cup trick

A different table compared the circumference of a tennis ball can to the length of the can. With three balls in the can, the length is very close to the circumference!

Pi tennis trick

A less clear demonstration of Pi was the toothpick table. Kids took forty toothpicks and scattered them over a large sheet of paper with lines on it. The lines were spaced one toothpick length apart, with each line as thick as a toothpick. After dropping, the kids took any toothpicks that didn't land on or across a line. L and another boy gathered twenty-one toothpicks. The lady did some formula and came up with the number 2.96, which is close to Pi. They had a chart on the wall of the different results throughout the day. Most were slightly below three but all in the 2.8 to 3.2 range.

Don't try this at home (because I don't remember the formula, so it won't work)

They had a story time with a reading of Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi, which was a fun fable. N was a bit fussy so I was not able to pay attention. L assures me it was fun. While we listened, J and Mommy did the scavenger hunt through the museum. It was lucky we divided our forces because the event almost ended before we were able to finish!

Pi Day swag

Back at home, we enjoyed some sweet potato pie as a fine end to our celebration of Pi Day in 2015.

Easy way to find the diameter