Pimooteewin on the CBC News!

Centennial College and the Pimooteewin Closing Ceremony was mentioned at the end of CBC's evening news last night!

Click here for CBC's < VIDEO LINK > and fast forward to marker 9:30 to see our 40 second spotlight.

Frieze and Fractal Fun

This morning in math class we started a new topic: Geometry!

Rather than just keep to the typical "What-is-a-point? What-is-a-midpoint? What-is-a-coplanar-line?" geometry introduction, we took a step further to look at the Native American friezes in clothing and quilting works. It turns out that there are just seven ways to manipulate a tile into a border pattern.

(Seven is a happy number that shows up everywhere: 7 Grandfather teachings, 7 ages of man, 7 days of the week, 7 classical planets, 7 musical notes, 7 pillars of wisdom, 7 chakras, and seven also represents the Universe with the 3 of heaven combined with 4 of the world.)

After that, we started making our own friezes and patterns.

For inspiration, we watched a video from NOVA, "Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension". A fractal is just a repeating pattern where the smaller parts actually look like the bigger parts when you zoom in all the way -- happening over and over again, forever!

Here are some colourful examples of fractals -- sometimes fractals are used to show naturally occuring examples in nature, like mountains and cauliflower and tree branches. Sometimes they're just amazing patterns:

Notice how the smaller parts look like miniature versions of the overal picture? That's what makes the pattern a "fractal". Check out how the following simple geometric shapes gradually turn into complex fractals -- see if you can come up with your own pattern:

Posted by Karen

Snow Day!!

Yesterday, Toronto was blanketed in more than 20 cm of white, fluffy snow.

For some schools, there hasn't been a snow day called in over a decade!

 

 Too bad classes were cancelled though. :(

Posted by Karen

Rock Crystal Candy

A couple Fridays ago we set up an experiment in class to make Rock Crystals.

These ones are just made of sugar mixed in water. The trick is to heat the water so that it can dissolve even more sugar than normal (called "super-saturation"). When the solution evaporates, sugar crystals should be left behind.

We used a kettle to boil the water in the classroom, then mixed it with as much sugar as we could in a large mixing bowl. Each of us came up with our own colour combination using food colouring mixtures.

The following Tuesday... nothing had happened. That was a surprise! The instructions called for crystals forming overnight but three days had passed with no effect!

By the following Friday, some small crystals had started to form on the surface of the sugar solutions. The red one solution by far the best looking crystal growth -- it had been the last one from the mixing bowl, which meant it had all the extra sugar from the bottom.

Next time we should try to keep a constant heat on the water and really try to super-saturate the solution before it cools.

Some brave souls tried to eat the rock crystals... Check out this YouTube < VIDEO LINK > to see what happened!

Posted by Karen

The Setting Sun

Last night we saw a beautiful sunset outside the windows of our classroom.

Now that we're into Winter and the sun is setting earlier every day, the sky becomes lit up with the gorgeous patterns of orange, pink, and purple hues only about a half hour after our classes finish.

Here it is, captured on camera in three shots and rendered into a panoramic view:

Posted by Karen