Travel
Designed and produced by the French CoI
The Travel c-book unit aims at taking into account more complex issues around speed than the Velocity c-book: travelling has a cost, you are not alone on the road, there are safety, environmental and economic issues around travels. It is composed of 4 activities. The price of speed is an activity on the computation the average speed of certain means of transportation, according not only to the time it takes to travel a certain distance, but as well to the time required to work in order to fund this travel. Deceleration activity is based on the Galileo-Galilei experiment of uniform acceleration applied to uniform deceleration. The braking distance activity takes into account different physiological parameters and also is computed as a function of speed. The last activity, the optimal speed of a road uses a simulation of cars on a road in order to measure the speed as a function of the density of a road. Then the activity goes back to algebra in order to compute the optimal speed of a road, yielding the maximal car flow.
Available at:
http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:4843881396961280
Modelling
Designed and produced by the French CoI
This c-book unit demonstrates the power of the straight line as a modelling tool, in several activities; lines that rise from visual and spatial perceptions to more abstract ones. For example a colour progression as a piecewise linear function in the space of colours allows to interact with representations in order to produce interesting pieces of kinetic art. No deep mathematical prerequisites are required for having fun and reasoning mathematically with the help of this c-book unit: deconstructing how an artwork is designed and reaching an aesthetic goal through the manipulation of control points is a clear indication of CMT.
Available at:
http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5073866426679296
Alice in Patternland
“Alice in Patternland” is a redesigned version by Greek CoI of the ‘The ‘not-algebra’ book’ c-book unit, initially designed by the UK CoI.
The redesigned c-book was designed by 4 members of the Greek CoI. The main topic of the c-book is the usage of patterns in mathematics, both in algebra and in geometry fields. The inspiration for the story was the book “Alice in Wonderland”, but now while Alice is falling in the rabbit-hole she realizes that the wall is full of patterns. As the story continues through the c-book pages, Alice lives an experience in the world of patterns and this offers the chance for the students to identify patterns in art and architecture, to create patterns, to generalize the regularity if the patterns through formulae and use them for getting the value of variables.
Available in 6 languages:
in Greek: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5673847051255808
in French: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5693584976117760
in English: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5731688986443776
in Dutch: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5204256265076736
in German: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5108709348868096
in Spanish: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5703462461374464
Viral Behaviour of Social Networks II
This c-book unit is a redesign by Greek CoI team. The original was designed by the Spanish CoI (www.mc2-project.eu/index.php/list-of-c-book-units/101-viral-behaviour-of-social-networks).
The theme of this c-book is a theory developed about “friendship” and “distance” between two persons, which is measured in terms of a chain of friends. For example, a friend of second degree is “a friend of my friend”, and a friend of third degree is “a friend of a friend of my friend”. Based on this model the theory claims that every person in this world can be connected to any person in any place by a six-degree friendship. This theory is introduced through a real incident, a party organized through Facebook. A mathematical model of this theory is presented through certain questions that students are expected to answer. The use of social networks might shorten this distance and this is the hypothesis the students are invited to investigate.
The c-book unit consists of three phases connected to each other in a linear way. These are the following:
• Understanding the degree of friendship: The story of a Dutch girl that used Facebook to announce her birthday party. Finally about 30,000 people attended the party, and this ended in riots.
• Small world: This phase explains the theory of “Six degrees of separation” using a series of questions included in its five pages. It concludes with an open question about the validity of this theory.
• You on Facebook: Several questions guide the investigation of the degrees of separation of the reader’s Facebook friends, using Wolfram Alpha. It leads to the conclusion that the degrees of separation are smaller, due to Facebook.
Available in 6 languages:
in Greek: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5114369981546496
in French: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:6013355626070016
in English: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5677319934967808
in Dutch: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5202961198219264
in German: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:6233536453410816
in Spanish: http://mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:5152359638368256
