The Fractal Foundation, Schoolhouse Rock, and More

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Triangle Cutout Fractal

Up first, check out the Fractal Foundation. They’re mission is simple: “We use the beauty of fractals to inspire interest in Science, Math and Art.” If you played around with recursive drawing a few weeks ago, then perhaps you were as inspired by fractals as they hope you’ll be. If you’re not really sure what fractals actually are, here’s a great one-page explanation from the Fractal Foundation website. They also have an excellent page of “fractivities,” including instructions for the beautiful paper cutout fractal pictured on the right. If you want to have your mind blow, check out their fantastic page of fractal videos. Just amazing.

Next up, have you ever heard of Schoolhouse Rock? It’s a series of rocking animated music videos that originally ran on TV from 1973 to 1985. Vintage math goodness! They cover all kinds of educational stuff like grammar and history, but I totally love the math videos, and a few of them are on YouTube! Down below you can watch two of my favorites, and you can find the others here. if you poke around YouTube, you could probably find a few more as well.

Finally, a few additions to our resource pages. For the Math Games page, we’re adding Linebounder. You and the computer battle to draw a line towards your goal. I had a really hard time with this at first, but there are certain strategies that the computer simply cannot beat. You just have to find them. Also new is Shift, another fun game that plays with the relationship between figure and ground. For the new Math Art Tools page, we’re adding Tessellate! It’s an interactive applet that lets you make custom tiles to cover the plane. Here’s a few examples I just made.

Bon appetit!

Hexagonal

Triangular

Rectangular

6 responses »

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Jenna Zager on October 21, 2013 at 7:59 PM said:

The game, “Shift” was as much as a challenge as it was fun! I really liked this game and how it wasn’t a simple key and door game. I loved how you could shift things to get out of tight spaces. However, I felt like it would have been more fun if the spikes wouldn’t go upside down with the maze. Overall, I liked the experience. Thanks!

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Riley A. on October 28, 2013 at 7:04 PM said:

At first i thought the game Shift was easy, but i knew that the people from math munch wouldn’t pick an easy game. Sure enough the game got harder and harder with moving spikes and the ability to actually shift. Overall it was a fun and challenging game that was worth my time.

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Dru Coronado on October 30, 2013 at 5:20 PM said:

The game Shift is a mind-racking game of strategy which i found very entertaining… Many times i had failed and failed over and over until i completed the level.

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Nico on December 15, 2013 at 7:18 PM said:

The game shift is a very fun strategic game! I enjoyed playing it very much! I had failed a bunch of times till I got the idea of what I had to do.when I was playing my brother came up and said he wanted to try playing it too and he had a great time!

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Dylan on October 2, 2014 at 8:03 PM said:

shift is a fun strategic game that gets harder and harder

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