January 21, 2006

Today, in class we explored words that have meanings in the English language but also have more formal mathematical meanings. Working in two groups, they developed lists of such words. Because of the nature of the task we also discussed definitions for homonym, homophone, antonyms. It was my intent to find words that had similar meanings not homophone (words that had the same pronunciation but different spellings) some and sum for instance or homonyms (the same pronunciations and the same spellings but completely different meanings), times for instance. This wasn't explicit to the students so they came up with all types of such words.

Several of the words on my list included:

• chaos
• limit
• sequence
• pie
• radius
• axis
• intercept
• time
• origin
• line
• calculate
• similar
• conclusion
• axes
• negative
• positive
• opposite
• plot
• plane
• parallel

These words we used as a segue into the next part of the lesson on chaos and fractals. The remaining part of the class we spent exploring several Interactivate activities:

• Tortoise and Hare
• Sierpinski's Triangle
• Sierpinski's Carpet
• Koch's Snowflake
• Chaos Game
• Julia Sets
• Flake Maker

All of these activities are linked to from the Interactivate activities page. Through these activities the students explored the concepts in the terms mentioned above.