bodmas blog

Timetabling (that three dimensional jigsaw puzzle) is occuring and it looks like I’ll be teaching a GCSE Maths course next year. Expect a week by week puzzle page. Hot Potatoes looks like the way to go with quizzes and puzzles delivered through a blog like WordPress with ‘future posting’. Animated formulas (see below) might be useful as revision/quick hints as well, although they look dangerously like adverts.

Napier’s bones were a calculating device much used in the 16th century, just after place notation with arabic numerals had replaced Roman numerals. You could replace a long multiplication problem with a series of additions and multiplications by 10, 100 and so on. The Wikipedia article for Napier’s Bones has details, references and diagrams.

• Alexander Bogolmony’s Cut the Knot Web site has a large number of illustrations of Maths using Java applets
• The Napier’s Bones page has a Java applet where you can change the bones.
• Undusting Napier’s Bones Greg Michaelson has provided a more extensive biography of Napier – alas his Java simulation does not appear to be working at least with the Java machine on this browser.

The implication is that 16th century businessmen found remembering their tables hard work and welcomed a short cut. Food for thought for those devising the “functional core” of Maths that will soon form part of the newly rewritten GCSE?

OpenOffice is a free Office suite containing a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation package and other tools. OpenOffice derives from Star Office, once a product produced by a German software house, now a commercial product distributed by Sun. OpenOffice is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, the last in two flavours.

NeoOffice/J is an Open Source build of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. NeoOffice/J runs under the native ‘Aqua’ desktop and the /J signifies the use of Java ‘widgets’ for some aspects of the application. This huge piece of work was started by two programmers who wanted an Aqua native build of OpenOffice. NeoOffice/J Build Candidate 1.1 is based on OpenOffice 1.1.4. The ‘official’ OpenOffice for Mac OS X is OpenOffice 1.1.2 and this runs under X11, the alternative window manager bundled with Mac OS X.

NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a 122 Mb download, and then there is another 4 Mb patch (the DMG files expand to fill 400 Mb of hard drive space). Installation is simply a question of running the package file and typing in your password. NeoOffice/J loads in about 30 seconds on first load in a session on my G4 iBook under Panther with 512 Mb of RAM. Subsequent loads take about 9 seconds. This compares with 12 seconds for Word 2004.

On Windows, OpenOffice can be made to convert Word files including MS Equation Editor objects and drawings. To allow ‘round trip’ editing, where you start writing something in Word, save it, pop it into OpenOffice on the laptop then save as Word, and then reload into Word to resume editing is easy enough. You must set an option found in the Options item of the tools menu. Just

• Select Options from the Tools menu item
• When the dialog box appears, click on the + next to Load/Save in the tree control on the left of the dialog box
• Select Microsoft Office from the next level of the tree control
• Tick all the check boxes that appear in the main right hand pane of the dialog box and click OK
• See the screen grab below for the important bits of the dialog box

Alas, this does not appear to be working in NeoOffice/J and attempts to export OpenOffice files to Word 2004 result in equation objects not displaying and in drawing objects being lost. This may be due to font issues on the Mac OS platform – there are issues about the symbol greek characters being different. I’m now trying to pin down if the Windows OpenOffice ‘round trip editing’ capability is a feature of Windows OLE functionality or if the lack of ‘round trip’ capability is a bug in NeoOffice.

If your work is pure text with a few tables and headings, then NeoOffice/J will provide ‘round trip’ editing for Word files. Equally, NeOffice/J provides PDF export, so work produced in NeoOffice can be accessed for reading or printing on other platforms.

Label designs can be a good source of colour combinations – real designers have to establish a look with just a few spot colours. I used the GIMP to isolate a range of colours from the central part of this olive oil can.

• select a central part of the logo with all the spot colours and copy
• paste as new and convert the tile to index colour
• check the Custom palette and choose Web, and set the dither to ‘none’
• select color map from the tools | colors menu item
• the map window shows all the colors in the graphic
• choose the ones nearest the olive oil can – 663333, 999900 and ffffcc by my eyes

The oil tastes nice as well

The Natioanl Library of Virtual Manipulatives for Interactive Mathematics is a Web site with a large number of Java applets that invite students to explore Mathematics problems. ‘Manipulatives’ is the US term for things like Cuisenaire rods and Dienes blocks.

The Java applets are mapped to the US curriculum based on ‘grades’. I have used the Algebra Balance Scales as a recap on equation solving. Alas, the applet dives into x’s on both sides’ problems – I’d like one that started with x on one side problems (3x + 5 = 17) first.

I use the applets on a projector for a whole class review and then students have the link on the course blog for use at home.