We had three new families joining the Club this Monday, with about twenty people participating. I keep planning name-related activities for the start, so that introductions get going in some meaningful ways. This time, we made a bit of poetry out of our names, most of it funny and even silly. It was Carol's idea to use poetry, because last week there was a Poem in Your Pocket day, as a part of the romantic April being the poetry month.

To make little poems, we analyzed syllables of first and last names, and created patterns that went exactly like the names. Because names tend to be meaningful and intimate, making even simple poems out of them is a meaningful and fun activity. It took a while to figure out how to find stress; kids who had experience with poetry and singing helped those less experienced. Yahoo Answers has a page with some advice on determining stress in poems.

Of course, the advanced level of this topic is to look at patterns in traditional poetry meters and styles, such as iamb or anapest.
We talked a little bit about differences in stresses between different languages, because among the Club members, we had last names originating from several different languages. It is another fascinating topic.
Some people define mathematics as the study of patterns. We drew all our name patterns, with stress and non-stress syllables in different colors and shapes. One could see that most English names had similar patterns.

Some of our poems had nonsense made-up words, like the famous Jabberwocky we also read together:
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

After playing some Human Knots outside, we proceeded to think about the next question: if you were to send a message to extraterrestrials, how would it look like, and what would you send? Some of more brilliant researchers, such as Carl Sagan, played with the idea. You can look at some of the previous ideas for such communications, for example, Apollo and Voyager plaques. The idea is that math is a universal language, so a math "sentence" can be communicated to any conscious being. Of course, kids slipped into the science fiction roleplay, and the activity kind of diverged into interesting, but unexpected discussions of various related topics. The moral of the story: it's hard to figure out WHAT to say to a being you have never met. Though the activity was somewhat confusing, nobody seemed to dislike it. I guess the questions it raised were amusing and/or profound enough.

We had a lunch break, for which we did not cook this time. After lunch, we balanced some plates, blocks and general shapes on one point (our fingers). We also made a simple device for finding that balance point (the center of gravity) using geometry and gravity, for more or less two-dimensional shapes. You hang your shape from some thread, and let a weight hang down from the same point, tracing the line. Doing that several times from different points around the edge of your shape, you will notice that all such lines intersect at one point: the shape's center of gravity. Of course, for a round plate the balancing act is trivial as far as geometry goes (though amusing, because we used real glass plates). For more complex shapes, finding the center of gravity is a more complex task. We even lifted a smaller volunteer, Caitlin (who is also known as a strong person who helps carry our tables and such around), to find her center of gravity somewhere around the belly button. I think we will work more with the topic next time, maybe making a mobile or some other toys. This Wikipedia article, while starting with some heavier math/physics formulas, describes the method we used and also has nice animations of some celestial systems' gravity centers.

We finished with a small, more directed activity that had to do with angles and their measures. Kids took turns making larger and larger angles, and I cut their drawings out of paper to put angles on top of each other for the kids to judge if they really do make bigger angles or not. It was a tad challenging to grow past the right angle, and the next hurdle was the straight (180 degrees, or Pi, as we called it) angle. The whole circle angle - 2Pi - seemed to be the largest one possible, but to keep growing, Madison suggested a spiral idea. From that, it was easy to keep making larger and larger angles (3Pi, 4Pi, and so on), and also to go negative, spiraling the other way. The topic has to do with some geometry constructions we did before, but I also hope to use it for playing with complex numbers some time in the future.

See you on the fifth of May! All that angle work made people hungry for pie, of course, so we will bake some - and see if we can achieve millions of combinations with the ingredients and shapes and other choices! Combinations grow exponentially, and... Oi, that's another story for another day.