Last week we were exploring volumes of various solids in the calculus course I’m teaching my son. That subject is a great opportunity to use 3d printing to enhance the course. In fact, this old video from Brooklyn Tech about 3d printing was one of my first exposures to using 3d printing in math education: … Continue reading Exploring Calculus with 3d printing
A few days ago we did a short project with some shapes that the boys and I had made using the F3 program: Using 3d printing to talk math with kids My older son made a “twisted octahedron” based on one of the examples that comes with the program. When we talked about the shape … Continue reading Using 3d printing to explore some basic ideas from calculus.
I’d seen three interesting pieces about calculus in the last couple of weeks. The first two had me thinking about how you could share some of the basic ideas from calculus with kids, and the last one helped me organize my thoughts. The three inspirations for today’s project are: (1) Keith Devlin’s Letter to a … Continue reading 3D printing and calculus concepts for kids
Over the winter break I began to think about collecting some of our 3d printing projects into to one post to highlight various different ways that 3d printing can be used to help kids explore math. The post got a little long, but if you are interesting in thinking about 3d printing and math, hopefully … Continue reading 3d printing ideas to explore math with kids
Yesterday I was able to watch the Global Math Project presentations (well, most of them) via the Facebook Live feed. Hopefully those videos will be preserved here: The Global Math Project’s Facebook page One tank that caught my eye was given by Henry Segerman. I’d guess that his work and Laura Taalman’s work account for … Continue reading *Ten 3D Printing math projects to help students explore math
Yesterday I saw an incredible new video from Grant Sanderson: As is the case with all of his videos, this one totally blew me away. I also thought that it has some fantastic ideas to share with kids. So, this morning we tried it out! I started by asking the boys about the area of … Continue reading Sharing Grant Sanderson’s Calculus Ideas video with kids
Finding the volume of the intersection of two cylinders is a common calculus problem. The shape also plays a role in this old (for the internet!) video from Brooklyn tech that inspired me to get a 3d printer: Today for a fun project to start the week I decided to share the shape with the … Continue reading Sharing a shape from calculus with kids
I saw a couple of tweets from Steven Strogatz yesterday that got me thinking about how you might use 3d printing in the college classroom: The last tweet, in particular, made me think that having the 3d print versions of the two shapes would be useful. Before I get too far in to this post, … Continue reading Using 3d printing in the college classroom
Calculating the volume of 3 intersecting cylinders is a classic calculus problem. The 3 cylinder problem caught my attention a few years ago when Patrick Honner shared this video about the 3d printing lab at his high school: I wrote about my reaction to the video here: Learning from 3D Printing Today we used our … Continue reading Exploring 3 intersecting cylinders with 3d printing
Today we did a 3d printing project revisiting an angle sum that we’d looked at last week -> arctan(1/2) + arctan(1/3). We started by reviewing how to approach the sum using complex numbers: Next my older son explained a geometric way to approach the problem: Now we went to Mathematica to create the 4 triangles … Continue reading Revisiting the angle sum arctan(1/2) + arctan(1/3)
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