July 11th, 2014 (Day 3)

Today in History

This Day in History
1405 Ming admiral Zheng He sets sail to explore the world for the first time.
1895 Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière demonstrate movie film technology to scientists
1899 Happy birthday to Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White
1909 Death of Simon Newcomb, Canadian Astronomer & Mathematician. [He was the first to discover the phenomena known as Benford’s Law).Aside on Benford’s law: most people assume that in a string of numbers sampled randomly from some body of data, the first non-zero digit could be any number from 1 through 9. All nine numbers would be regarded as equally probable. However, if we take random samples from a day’s stock quotations, a tournament’s tennis scores, the numbers on the front page of The New York Times, the populations of towns, electricity bills in the Solomon Islands, the molecular weights of compounds, the half-lives of radioactive atoms, death rates, lengths of rivers and much more — this is not so.Given a string of at least four numbers sampled from one or more of these sets of data, the chance that the first digit will be 1 is not one in nine, … it is 30.1 percent, or nearly one in three. The chance that the first number in the string will be 2 is only 17.6 percent, and the probabilities that successive numbers will be the first digit decline smoothly up to 9, which has only a 4.6 percent chance. [Thanks to Wikipedia & rexswain.com for the description above]
1914 Babe Ruth made his MLB debut
1918 Venetia Burney, English girl, who named Pluto (d. 2009) was born today
1930 Australian cricketer Sir Donald Bradman scores a world record 309 runs in one day, on his way to the highest individual Test innings of 334, during a Test match against England.
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, first published in US
1962 First transatlantic satellite television transmission.
1979 Skylab, America’s first space station,was destroyed as it entered Earth’s atmosphere
1987 The world’s population reached five billion people, and today is now known as World Population Day

 

Yesterday in Chicago

  Tech Tips

   Storify 

  • Day Two [Thanks to the Fab Five]

 Today in Chicago

Today in History
World of Wonder
Readings & Discussion 

Tech Tips
  Teaching Demonstration Model

  • First teaching demonstration from instructors
  • Responses to teaching demonstration framework

 

   QuickFire

  • Where does it STEM from?
Reflection Time

  • Today’s Moment of WOW
Video to End the Day: 

 

 

Homework

Prepare lesson and materials for Teaching Demonstration Complete the following readings and be prepared to discuss in class

Also, start brainstorming ideas for your year-long project. What kind of disciplinary knowledge would you like to target? What are some key concepts that you would like to focus on? What are you passionate about? What do you see your students having problems with? Start taking some notes since we will focus quite a bit of our time over the next few days on this. It is never too early to start.