Newsletters | Newsletter Archive BLOSSOMS What's New? July 2011
   
 
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July 2011

What's New?

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Two New Video Lessons on the BLOSSOMS Website:
The Mathematics of Voting
Mathematics of VotingPick your candidate!  Suppose four candidates run for office. Each voter is asked to rank them from first to last choice. The votes are then cast! For the given set of votes, the "winner" depends on the rules for scoring.  This video shows that virtually any of four candidates could win for any given set of votes cast. The winner depends on the scoring method used, and these methods are not obscure. Each is used somewhere in the world to pick politicians, leaders of associations, etc. The video teacher here is Dr. Andy Felt, Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point. He is assisted by his student, Chris Natzke. Check it out!

How Cold is Cold: What is Temperature? 
Rick McMaster"Brrrrr..., it's cold outside. I've got to warm up!" But someone in Alaska may have a very different view of Cold compared to someone in say, Florida or the Middle East. In this video we learn about the science of temperature. What is it? Are there many ways to measure it? Are there simple experiments we can perform that inform us about our perception of cold and hot? This lesson is presented by Dr. Rick McMaster, STEM Advocate in IBM’s University Programs Worldwide. Watch it!

Great Classroom Resources from the MIT Haystack
MIT Haystack Observatory

MIT’s Haystack Observatory is an interdisciplinary research center focused on radio astronomy, geodesy, and atmospheric science. The Haystack Pre-College Resources include 13 complete lessons, with titles such as: "Meet Me in the Mesosphere: Investigation of Atmospheric Processes for Classroom Studies"; "Waves in Motion"; "Demystifying Scientific Data"; and many more. Most of the original material presented in this web-site has been developed by TEACHERS, with the assistance of the staff at MIT/Haystack. All lesson plans have been successfully used in high school classrooms. Take a look!

MIT BLOSSOMS in Brazil
We are pleased to report that Brazil's largest educational TV network, the highly Flagrespected Canal Futura, has partnered with BLOSSOMS. Canal Futura is regularly viewed by over 35 million Brazilians. Recognizing BLOSSOMS content as complimentary to the Brazilian High School Curriculum, Canal Futura has selected 37 BLOSSOMS lessons to translate into Portuguese—via subtitling—and to broadcast multiple times over its extensive network. This adds a fourth language to BLOSSOMS:  Portuguese, in addition to English, Arabic and Urdu.  In recognition of this significant new collaboration, we are adding the Brazilian flag to the new BLOSSOMS web site, indicating Brazil's country partnership with BLOSSOMS.

Coming Soon to
MIT BLOSSOMS!

Making Many from Few:
How New Species are Formed

patternsArabesque Patterns:
Where Art and
Mathematics Meet

Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Meet a BLOSSOMS
video teacher
Dr. Naveed MalikDr. Naveed Malik is Founding Rector of the Pakistan Virtual University (PVU) and Project Manager of the MIT BLOSSOMS Initiative in Pakistan. Before moving to the PVU, Dr. Malik was a staff member at the University of the Punjab—Pakistan’s largest and oldest university—where he established the Spark Source Mass Spectroscopy Laboratory at the Centre for Solid State Physics and later became the founding chairman of the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Malik was also Coordinator of the PANdora Project that conducted a major series of studies in nine Asian countries with the goal of developing practices and policies to enhance the use of distance learning technologies in Asia. Watch his BLOSSOMS video lesson, “The Physics of Donkey Carts”, in either English or Urdu.
Training workshop
in Saudi Arabia
MIT BLOSSOMS conducted a 5-day teacher training workshop in Saudi Arabia for 200 high school teachers. Read the press release.