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!

Shakespeare Revealed

Recently on Brydseed I read the statement "structure leads to creativity" and raised this discussion with the Year 7/8 Inquiry group. While we certainly don't all agree the students did agree to think about this idea.

We all know William Shakespeare wrote a multitude of plays but how familiar are we with his poetry? 404 years ago Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 18, one of the most famous love poems of all time. After some research into "What makes a sonnet a sonnet?" we discovered there are very strict rules and lots of them. We also discovered that Shakespeare not only followed these rules but created them!

Follow our work as we attempt to write our own sonnets. Wish us luck!

10 000 Hits!

Wow! We have had 10 000 hits on the investiGATE@Kimihia site. What a feat! It's great to know people are watching the site and following our progress. What's next? 100 000 seems like a reasonable goal.
These are pretty special numbers to us at GATE Kimihia. If you are keen to find out more inteersting  information about the numbers 0 to 9999 click here

Another Look at Last Year's Science Fair Success

This information has been moved from the Science Fair page to make way for the 2013 Science Fair.

Below are the 2012 entries and winners. Joe, Cameron and Liam went on to win 2nd Place in the Physical World category at the Waikato Science Fair and Sonya and Kirsten went on to win a Highly Commended award at the Waikato Science Fair.

Following a great deal of hard work students finally submitted their project boards for judging at our school science fair. The investigations were varied and included finding which fruits grow the most mould, which soft drinks create the best Mentos volcanoes and which firewood burns best. Thanks to Pamela Dunn and Jasmine Ahmu for judging the competition.

And the winners were:

1st place: Kirsten Maclaurin and Sonya Fenton with Menacing Mould

2nd place: Joe Harris, Cameron Mailer and Liam Loveridge with Fire Fury

3rd place: Joel Geissmann with Tough Stuff



Highly Commended: New Helper by Jennifer Qiu





Fishy Business by Katie Simpson

Liquid Electricity by Katelynn Pini and Jemma Goodall





Bombs Away by Brendan Hunt and Brandyn Smith

Recommended Reading

The holidays have been a great opportunity to get lost in a good book. Check out the new titles on the blog bookshelf. Don't forget that if you have read a great book you'd like to recommend to others, write a short book review and we'll add it to the book review page.

We're back

It's been very quiet for the last couple of months while we have all been enjoying the summer sunshine... but we're back and looking forward to another busy year of learning. And just to get you started here are 50 collective nouns to bolster your vocabulary

A superfluity of nuns



A murder of crows