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Dear Friends of Math Cats,

Greetings! I am pleased to welcome 115 new subscribers to Math Cats News, so that we now have 205 "Friends of Math Cats" from 13 countries.

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     WHAT’S NEW AT MATH CATS
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In the past month, Math Cats has added these projects:

1) In the MicroWorlds section:

a) In honor of Valentines Day, you can create a variety of heart designs using buttons and number sliders to control the layout and the size, thickness, color, and quantity of hearts. It is fun to build up an elaborate design with several layers of heart arrangements of different sizes and colors. You can create a temporary online slideshow of your designs. You can use the "PrtSc" button (PC) or Appple-Control-3 (Mac) to capture one screen image at a time and paste your favorite designs into a paint program, then crop them and save as GIF images to print out and make colorful, geometric valentines for your friends, family, or students.

b) The Silly Recipe Machine selects random numbers and words from hidden lists to create -- you guessed it -- silly recipes. You can add your own ideas to these lists.

c) The Riddle Machine poses random number riddles and then their answers, also from hidden lists to which you can add your own riddles.

Please remember that anyone can download the free MicroWorlds Web Player to use all of the MicroWorlds projects at Math Cats (just as you may have downloaded Flash or Shockwave to use interactive projects at other sites). There is a link from every page in that section. If you haven't yet tried the MicroWorlds projects, they are probably the best part of Math Cats.

For any of you who own MicroWorlds and would like to build these projects yourselves to use offline, the procedures are all posted on the accompanying overview pages.

MicroWorlds is a multimedia version of the Logo programming language. It is easy and powerful, perfect for learning the basics of computer programming. While I have not yet announced this on the site, Math Cats is an authorized reseller of MicroWorlds (single copies and site licenses), and our prices are about 15% less than you'll find at the MicroWorlds site. Please send me an e-mail message if you'd like the details.

2) In the Explore section:

a) Tessellation Town on Tile Island is a world you build yourself with dragable online tessellating puzzle pieces (identically-shaped pieces which fit together with no gaps). You can fill pages with tess people, houses, floor tiles, trees, flowers, fish, waves, seaweed, animals, and Escher designs. You'll also find instructions on creating your own tessellations. The dragable puzzle pieces can also be used to explore patterns in a variety of colors.

b) The Encyclogram and Exploding Math Art have lots of sliders for creating your own math art. You don't have to understand the math that makes them work to have loads of fun experimenting with them!

c) The Interactive Multiplication Table helps children to visualize multiplication facts while learning them. (Please remember that there are also two interactive multiplication activities in the MicroWorlds section... but this new one in the Explore section does not require the MicroWorlds plug-in.)

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     SPOTLIGHT ON A SITE
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The Digital Collection at the Hermitage Museum, Russia
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/fcgi-bin/db2www/qbicSearch.mac/qbic?selLang=E nglish

Did you know that you can use geometry to search an online art museum? IBM and the Hermitage Museum have partnered, using cutting-edge technology to make this possible. The link above takes you straight to the QBIC Colour and Layout Searches. It's the layout search which uses geometric shapes to search for art. For instance, you draw a blue oval and drag it to the bottom of the layout window to represent a body of water. Click "Search," and thumbnails of a variety of water scenes will be displayed. Click on the scene of your choice for a large version, and then use the special zoom technology to get a really close-up look at a portion of the painting, if you'd like. If you want to narrow your search to water scenes with trees in the background, go back and draw a new geometric layout with a blue oval and one or two tall, thin brown rectangles topped by green circles, to suggest trees. You can also use the Colour Search to choose the proportions of various colors in a painting. It is fascinating, for instance, to see the variety of paintings which use red as a dominant color. You do have to be a bit patient for these high-tech pages to load, but my students last year absolutely LOVED visiting this site over and over again.

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     MATH CATS IS HONORED
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* For a 24-hour period which began late last night, Math Cats is the "Cool Site of the Night" at http://www.csotn.com

* On January 28, Math Cats was reviewed in Access Magazine (a Sunday supplement distributed in over 10 million newspapers throughout the U.S.), and received four "a's" -- their highest ranking. It remains in the online Access Magazine "A-list" in the education section:
http://www.accessmagazine.com/reviews/alist/archive/education/educ.jsp

or you can go straight to the review itself:
http://www.accessmagazine.com/reviews/websites/education/homeworkhelp/mathhe lp/02806755.jsp?Element_ID=2806755

* An increasing number of school sites have linked to Math Cats. This always feels like an honor, but perhaps never more so than last night, when Math Cats was visited through a link from a small school in a remote, roadless part of Alaska, where access in and out of the town of Napaskiak is by river (and the river is currently frozen to a thickness of six feet). I was deeply moved as I sat at my laptop computer at my kitchen table late last night, following the link back from my site traffic stats to this school's site, to know that on a cold winter night in an Eskimo village, someone was visiting Math Cats.

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Lots more projects are coming soon to Math Cats, so I hope you’ll drop by for regular visits. I welcome your input. And if you like the Math Cats site and Math Cats News, I hope you will help spread the word to others. Please forward this Math Cats News to others! (If you receive this Math Cats News as a forwarded e-mail and would like to subscribe, you can sign up in the "4 older cats" area of Math Cats.)

Thanks,

Wendy Petti of Math Cats
http://www.mathcats.com
wpetti@mathcats.com

(P.S. If you ever want to unsubscribe, just drop me a line at the e-mail address above. You can write "unsubscribe" or use the words of your choice to convey the message!)