We had about ten people, kids and adults, at the meeting this Monday. We played two games and did a job of figuring out recipes and making soups.

For starters, we made Mobius Strip name tags just to make sure everybody knows everybody else's name. Mobius strip is a one-side, one-edge loop surface with funky properties. It is one of favorite objects of Topology, which is a branch of math studying edges, holes and dimensions algebraically. Here is a site on some knitting fun with Mobius. Kelly mentioned she made a Mobius scarf before, and it was fun and special.


picture by bucky2k

We played Definition Wars again, this time using regular polygons (squares, rectangles, rhombuses and so on). Interestingly, children created their own terms, such as "skew" (meaning "non-right angle" or "squish" (meaning "non-equal sides" and used them consistently, together with more conventional terms, such as "sides" and "angles." The art and science of MAKING definitions and of finding objections (counterexamples) to other people's definitions is useful for all formal scientific disciplines. This particular day, we focused on geometric definitions, of course. Children are struggling with creating definitions, in my mind, in a good manner. They did develop working definitions of some quadrilaterals, while others still baffle them.

As for soup, we had a table full of ingredients, more than twenty in all, from carrots to bok choy, from rice to ground beef and some spices. Kids made tags for cooking times for each ingredient, then used a reverse timeline (counting backwards from the end of cooking) to situate all ingredients, and then used that timeline to write down cooking recipes. One soup was hearty, with heavier veggies, more spices and beef, and the other lighter, with more tender veggies and some lemon juice. We need soup names to go with recipes and pictures - something to do next time! Work with timelines is widely used in all scientific disciplines, such as physics and biology, and also in social sciences and applications: history, management, sociology, developmental psychology and so on. Since humans don't have a separate metaphor for time, we usually use a space metaphor, such as a line, to deal with that difficult concept. The additional difficulty of cooking planning is that you have to reverse your timeline, counting backwards at first. The same trick is usually used with event planning. There is quite a lot of software for making timelines, which you can find with this Google search. Of course, children sliced veggies and mixed and spiced their soups by themselves, which seemed to be a lot of fun.

While waiting for soups to get ready, and watching our timeline timers, we played a game of Silly Robot. This is an "algorithm introduction" game, somewhat opposite to the "Map by phone" game we played last time. One player, "the silly robot" is trying as hard as he or she can to mess up the task without actually disobeying directions. For example, if the task is to draw a rectangle and the step direction is "Draw a line" - the robot's quite likely to draw a squiggly line, since the straight line wasn't specified. Again, we used the game for some mundane tasks, like filling a cup with water, or slicing a sweet bell pepper, and some less mundane tasks, like drawing a parallelogram. Construction tasks in particular are a large part of formal geometry; this game gently introduces the necessity of being quite exact in construction step descriptions. This game also easily leads to algorithm discussions, such as loops (when a series of steps is repeated again and again), if-then structures, and so on. Again, making exact step-by-step drawing instructions for constructing quadrilaterals is still quite challenging, and brings a lot of terminology into active, rather than passive, understanding.

The two soups came out rather tasty.