Monsters Under the Bed?

Have you heard of Rube Goldberg? Very briefly he was an American cartoonist best known for his cartoons depicting deliberately over engineered gadgets that perform simple tasks in convoluted ways. Many people have created their own Rube Goldberg machines and contraptions, even kids! Have a look at what Audri has created to trap a monster!


Have a go yourself. We would love to see a cartoon or a construction of your very own Rube Goldberg machine. What are you capable of?

Quest is Fun

For those of you requiring a little inspiration to start 2014 take a look at this TedXYouth@Auckland presentation by Tristan Pang. Tristan is a remarkable young man driven by curiosity to understand the world around him. He has clear goals and is well on his way to achieving them. Be inspired!

That's Progress

The Otago Maths Group are taking part in the Problem Solving Competition run by the University of Otago. Over Terms 2 and 3 the students complete five sets of five problems in half an hour. We have kept a record of the total number of correct answers achieved by the group. Look at our progress over the three sets we have completed so far! In the first set we solved 53% of the problems but by Set 3 we improved our problem solving skills and solved 75% of the problems correctly. Keep it up you clever mathematicians!

Live Life Like a Marathon Not a Sprint

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

Have Your Say!

As part of our school vision, we are keen to ensure that all students have opportunities to develop their potential in areas of strength.

The teachers and parents have been talking about students’ gifts and talents but we also want to hear from the students. If you are involved in the GATE programme at Kimihia school please click on this link to the SURVEY where you get to have your say.

World Loses Great Mathematician

Shakuntala Devi
Shakuntala Devi, the Indian mathematical wizard known as "the human computer" for her ability to make incredibly swift calculations, died last month in Bangalore, India. She was 83.

Ms. Devi demonstrated her mathematical gifts around the world, at colleges, in theaters and on radio and television. In 1977, at a University in Dallas, she extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds, beating a computer which took 62 seconds.

In 1980, at the Imperial College in London, she correctly multiplied two 13-digit numbers in only 28 seconds. The 28 seconds included the time to recite the 26-digit solution. The numbers were selected at random by a computer. Here is the calculation. Try and do it in your head!

7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779.

Struggling for the answer? Not even your calculator will give it to you. It is 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730.

If you are looking around in second hand book shops and come across Shakuntala's best selling book "The Joy Of Numbers" then make sure you buy it for your bookshelf.

Chocolate Fish Challenge

Here we go again with those tricky maths puzzles. Can you write an equation using only 5, 2 and 2 to make 0.7? 

Enter your solutions as a comment here or through your Kidsblog.

If Shakespeare Could See Us Now

I read about the Bard upon a site,

That kids could write a sonnet on their own.

I pondered on the subject overnight,

Decided that we could; outcome unknown.

Returned to school to introduce the Bard,

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

So many rules he set to make it hard,

So hard to write a masterpiece this way,

Ideas flowed, and structure soon was built,

The syllables and rhymes worked as they ought,

Iambs in fives proved far more difficult,

The task seemed out of reach, or so we thought.

But finally our sonnets are refined,

A prouder teacher you will never find!

Wow, what a term it's been for our Year 7/8 authors! Today it was thrilling to see the pride and satisfaction on each other's faces as we put the final touches on our writing. We hope you enjoy reading our work as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Teddy Town Revisited





Erica's Solution

Welcome  back to Teddy Town. Wow! We have come a long way from our first confused and frustrated attempts at solving this puzzle. Today three of us managed to find a solution.


In Teddy Town there are four houses of each colour and four teddies of each colour. The streets are very special. If you walk along a street from east to west all the houses are a different colour and the teddies living in the houses are a different colour too. The same is true if you walk in a north south direction. In other words, looking at a map grid, each row and column must have different coloured houses and different coloured teddies. If you can find a solution to this puzzle try adding one more house and one more teddy of each colour along with five pink houses and five pink teddies and arranging them in a five by five array.



Connor's Solution

Ray's Solution

Progress

It may seem we have had a very quiet month but in actual fact it's been very busy. We have been working hard on our sonnets and finding them quite a challenge. Our first task was to select an object to write about, and consider how the object's emotions will change from the beginning to the end of the sonnet. Some very imaginative subjects have emerged. Winter snow, a plastic shopping bag, tennis balls, a horse's saddle, boron to silly putty.
The next step was to formulate the ideas for each quatrian and for a few of us this has required some research so we could fully understand the processes our objects are subjected to.
Then came the application of all those rules and this is where the real challenge begins. Rhyming patterns, decasyllabic lines and iambic pentameter. We are learning alot about the stress on the syllables within a word, including how to use the pronunciation guide of a dictionary.
Bit by bit we are making progress and I can't wait to share some student work with you.
Watch this space!