Thursday, July 9, 2015

Wormholes and Tesseracts in the Classroom - Part 2


In Part A I looked at some inspiring ideas about teaching in the movie Interstellar. Here are some ideas for using some Interstellar content in the classroom.

Exploring Dimensions: whether you're doing lessons on 2D and 3D solids, or just having a discussion why we say "x-squared" and "x-cubed" but "x-to-the-fourth", it's time to bring out The Tesseract.  In the Interstellar version, it's an object that has spatial and time dimensions: as the main character Cooper moves through space, he's moving into different time "rooms".

"Time is represented here as a physical dimension"
Warning: SPOILER for the film!

My Year 7 students liked this, and were very fast on their internet devices to find more traditional mathematical representations of the tesseract (the hypercube) which made for a good discussion.

Permutations and Combinations: I haven't worked it out yet, but there's definitely a perms and combs activity to do with the CASE and TARS robots! Might link in well with a Quadrilaterals exploration too.



Watch CASE at work on Miller's Planet: 



Some good resources:


An exciting way to introduce circular motion:


A nice adjunct to the more classic and sedate circular motion sequences in my other all time favourite movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey".

And for something different, you may like to point your music teacher friends at this mini documentary about the making of the soundtrack:



No comments:

Post a Comment