Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s Infinity video with kids

The latest PBS Infinite Series video came out this week:

This is the 4th video in an incredible series from Kelsey Houston-Edwards. Our projects on the first 3 are here:

Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edward’s [higher dimensional spheres] video with kids

Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edward’s Philosophy of Math video with kids

Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edward’s Pigeonhole Principle with kids

I had the boys watch the new video together and started today’s project by asking them what they thought was interesting.

After hearing what the kids found interesting, we dove into the idea of bijections. We talked a bit about how a bijection has to work both ways using the bus idea from the video.

After the bus example we moved on to the example of the bijection between the points in an interval and points on the real line.

We finished up by talking about the bijection between the national numbers and the positive even integers.

Since we’ve done several prior projects where infinity played some role, the next thing I asked the kids was for some thing that they already knew about infinity – both things that they thought made sense and things that they thought didn’t make sense. The discussion and examples here were amazing – “no one knows what infinity divided by infinity is” 🙂

Finally, we wrapped up the project talking about why the infinity associated with the real numbers is larger than the infinity associated with the natural numbers.

I thought this would be a fun way to end the project since it was one of the key ideas in Houston-Edwards’s video:

So, another really fun project from the new set of math videos from PBS Infinite Series. I love this new series – can’t wait for the next one!

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