Thaddeus K. Fong is not a nice kid. He didn’t invite anybody to his birthday party so he could eat all the cake himself (and only invited his grandma because she’s diabetic). He has dreams of world domination. But what …
Continue ReadingTeam Umizoomi is a new kid’s show, geared toward the preschool set, premiering this week on Nickelodeon. Why are the GeekDads really excited about this? Well, for one thing, the show’s focus is on teaching preschoolers the basics of math. …
Continue ReadingNews from The Department of Geek Things You Didn’t Even KNOW There Were Records For: A team of professors from Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University and the University of Michigan have set a new world record for packing …
Continue ReadingWhile we were preparing the menu for our upcoming feast, my wife asked how many guests we’ll be having. Being the geek that I am, I answered: Half are from out-of-state, one quarter are from in-state but out-of-town, one seventh …
Continue Reading(Video: Phil Torrone, Community Commons) Looking at this video, we see the Adafruit’s pt riding on a bicycle with square wheels, yet the ride is totally smooth. How can this be? The secret is that the surface must be the …
Continue ReadingThere are many reasons that I wish I had played Dungeons and Dragons, or any RPG for that matter, when I was younger. Sure, it wouldn’t have garnered me much in the way of cool points, but I’d ostensibly revoked …
Continue ReadingAbout a year ago, we discovered an awesome game called Numbers League: Adventures in Addiplication, put out by Bent Castle Workshops. We first played it at the 2008 Mensa Mind Games in Phoenix (see my post on this year’s Mind …
Continue ReadingMy iPhone has become my kids’ occasional babysitter. Whenever we have to wait longer than 60 seconds, I hear the familiar refrain of “Dad, can I play a game on your phone?” I don’t always indulge them because they also …
Continue ReadingIt’s a familiar picture: A middle school student stares absently at his dog-eared algebra textbook, trying to force his way through the evening’s set of quadratic equations. As he chews on his pen cap, searching for the intersection of parabolas, he wonders aloud "Why do I have to do this – I’m never going to […]
Continue ReadingImage via Wikipedia March 14th is Pi Day. Get it? 3.14? Clever, huh? (Unless you write your dates with the day first, then month, which would be 14.3 and would not mean much of anything.) I would suggest observing Pi Day by making a pie, then try to determine its circumference while eating it with […]
Continue ReadingI love math, and I’ve always been really good at it. I haven’t conducted a scientific study, but from my observations there’s a direct correlation between the two—that is, the love of math and skill at it. It makes a certain amount of sense that someone who loves math would take the time to get […]
Continue ReadingWe are now in Samhein, the period between Halloween and the Winter Solstice, when the veil between this world and the next becomes thin enough for inhabitants of one realm to pass through to the other. For many cultures, this period of waning daylight is fraught with dread, and inspires a search for a higher […]
Continue ReadingFollowing up on Vince’s post about how instilling confidence in young girls improves their interest in math, I’d like to mention some other important factors pointed out to me by a mother who’s raised two mathematically-talented daughters. On Friday, The …
Continue ReadingJohn Herrington has taken in the earth from a view that few of us will every see. He spent 13 days in space as part of STS-113, a trip on Endeavor to the International Space Station in late 2002. It was a flight that included nearly 20 hours of space walks for the Mission Specialist. […]
Continue ReadingOne year ago, we were reading this by Kevin Kelly on GeekDad: Dick Termes paints complicated scenes on spheres. These pictures are complete worlds that provide an eire optical illusion. As you twirl the sphere it can seem as if you are inside the sphere looking out at the scene. This illusion is accomplished with […]
Continue ReadingEdward Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist, passed away last week at the age of 90. He was widely known for his groundbreaking work Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, which crafted a framework for explaining why weather patterns behave in ways that cannot be described by classical dynamics and cannot be predicted more than a few days in advance. […]
Continue ReadingI was pleasantly surprised to find the Singapore method of teaching math being recommended last week by a government panel looking into elementary mathematics instruction in this country. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s Final Report to the President of the United States and the Secretary of Education found that most American schools expect teachers to […]
Continue ReadingAs everyone knows, Euler’s Constant equals approximately 2.71828182845904523536. Well, apparently mathematicians have decided to make February 7th e day after the first two numbers of that constant. Supporters note that pi day (March 14th) remains vastly more popular, but phi day (January 6th) is still a distant third.
Continue ReadingWhen girls hit middle school they’re already undergoing incredible physical and mental changes. Parents watch as their sweet little girl becomes a temperamental, acne-obsessing young woman flipping through an Express catalog with a phone glued to her ear*. Quite often, the start of middle school also signals an end to her interest in math. Needless […]
Continue ReadingWe have science fairs at school (or at least we should); why not math fairs? Math fairs cultivate the language of math and give this essential skill a cool factor. Our kids have attended such math fairs and it has helped them think of math as fun, festive, and full of color. Anytime you turn […]
Continue ReadingThe summer is drawing to a close, and kids are beginning to get restless as the prospect of returning to school draws near. What better way to enjoy a geekdad-led educational adventure than a hunt for the golden ratio? The golden ratio is a naturally occurring constant. If A+B divided by A equals A over […]
Continue ReadingPaul Nyhan, Family and Parenting reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and author of the smart blog Working Dad, posted about research that says the math/science gender gap often begins at home…specifically, with fathers. “They found that girls’ interest in math decreases as their fathers’ gender stereotypes increase, whereas boys’ interest in math increases as their […]
Continue ReadingSure a show in which one tough guy makes life and death decisions while testing the limits of our Constitution in a contrived 24 episode story arc can be quite exciting. In a Fox television world gone mad, agent Jack Bauer looks like our only hope. However, I gotta say that our real world has […]
Continue ReadingCodes are fun. Kids love thinking that they can write something only their friend will be able to read. But more importantly, at least from a geekdad’s perspective, is that when your kid learns about codes, he or she also learns a ton about math, language and history. For instance, delving into the Enigma story […]
Continue ReadingDick Termes paints complicated scenes on spheres. These pictures are complete worlds that provide an eire optical illusion. As you twirl the sphere it can seem as if you are inside the sphere looking out at the scene. This illusion is accomplished with a mathematical trick call 6-point perspective. You’ve heard of a vanishing point […]
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