The Harmony Learning Community Blog

News, Updates, Program Recaps, and Homeschooling Information

When Cake is 20, Pie is 5

Posted by Rodi Steinig 
· Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 

The arbitrariness of variable names.   When cake is 20, pie is 5. When cake is 100, pie is 85. So pie = cake – 15, or p = c -15. The students named these variables, figured out the rule, and created the equation after we had first done a traditional function machine and then discarded the conventional language (‘”in,out”…

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The Hydra Head Exponential Growth Function

Posted by Rodi Steinig 
· Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 

Do you feel like you learned some real mathematics here today?   Before showing Vi Hart’s “Binary Trees” short film, we did a few function machines as we waited for everyone to arrive. (This session was class 1 of a new session for middle-school kids.) The rule y=2x was obvious. The next rule, y=x squared, was obvious as well, but…

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