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Dear Friends of Math Cats,

Greetings! I'm fighting off a major case of spring fever to bring you this long-overdue new issue of Math Cats News. I am pleased to welcome 55 new subscribers to Math Cats News, so that we now have 260 "Friends of Math Cats." If you like the Math Cats website or this Math Cats News, please help spread the word!

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     WHAT'S NEW AT MATH CATS
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Since our last issue, Math Cats has added these new projects:

1) in the MicroWorlds section:

a) INCHWORM

In honor of springtime, the latest project features an inchworm who measures randomly-drawn marigolds. (What unit of measurement does a cyber-inchworm use? Pixels, of course!) The inchworm crawls to the tune of "Inchworm" from the musical, Hans Christian Andersen, while the lyrics are displayed. (You'll also find them at the end of this newsletter.)

b) WHAT A CROWD!

This project is a great way to practice your estimation skills. A crowd of people is randomly created -- anywhere from 15 up to 2,000 tiny people! You have a short amount of time in which to estimate how many people are in the crowd. After you make your best guess, the project tells you how many people were actually in the crowd and awards points based on how close you came to this number. Then it shows you the crowd again, in case you would like to spend more time exploring a good estimation strategy before clicking a button to create a new crowd.

While many sites offer interactive quizzing on basic computational skills, this is the only interactive project I'm aware of which lets you practice estimating large numbers. It is also fun to watch the colorful crowds being created, starting with the tiniest people near the top of the screen, growing larger as the crowd fills in the foreground.

c) FOLLOW A PATH

This project is an introduction to writing Logo commands (and using math) to control a moving turtle. A simple path to a house is randomly drawn, with randomly placed trees scattered about the scene, and then you can type Logo commands to steer a turtle along the path until he reaches the house. With just three simple words -- FD (forward), RT (right), and LT (left), each followed by a number -- you can move the turtle anywhere you want it to go. It is fun to try to get him to the house with the fewest possible number of commands.

d) DANCING CAT

A young boy named Bradley e-mailed to Math Cats a great photo of his crazed-looking cat, Cristal, and I just had to create a little project to make Cristal do all sorts of silly things, controlled by the numbers on sliders. So now this cat can dance, hop, fly, do cartwheels, and do jumping jacks, at all kinds of speeds, while complaining nonstop through random messages appearing in a cloud above his head.

In order to use these interactive MicroWorlds projects, you do need to download the free MicroWorlds Web Player (a plug-in). There is a link to the download page from every project on the Math Cats site. You do not need to know a thing about MicroWorlds or Logo programming in order to enjoy these projects online. But if you want to know more about how to create projects like these on your own, there is a companion page for most projects which tells how.

2) In the Explore section:

MATH GAMES AT MATH CATS

Some children have written to ask me why there are no math games at Math Cats (there really are! if you download that MicroWorlds plug-in!), and so I finally decided to create a game for the Explore section, with more to follow. Math Cats is more about creative explorations with math than about learning or practicing basic math skills through games. (There are plenty of other sites for that!) So I tried at least to create a game which would require thinking skills as well as mathematical knowledge. In this first game, geared for ages 8 and up, there are 32 cats in four rows, each holding a mathematical expression (such as 15 + 9, or 6 x 7, or 71 - 59). You try to move the cats, one by one, into a long line of cats, but you can only move a cat if it is at the end of a row, if it matches the coloring of the last cat you moved, or if the value of its mathematical expression equals the value held by the last cat you moved. This means that you need to be thinking about all four basic operations within one game (and it helps if you can do the math in your head), but you also need to plan ahead so that you don't get stuck with a few unrelated cats at the end. If you do, the game lets you backtrack a few moves or start over with the same random arrangement of cats. Or you can give up and start fresh with a new arrangement of the cats. I myself find it personally challenging to line up all 32 cats! But it is lots of fun to try, and the game reinforces some basic skills while making you think.

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     MATH CATS IS HONORED
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Math Cats has recently been honored with a new online award and two glowing print reviews:

* DIGITAL DOZEN at ENC

During the month of April 2001, Math Cats has been one of the "Digital Dozen" at the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (http://www.enc.org), which is a wonderful site for math and science educators featuring education news and over 17,000 annotated listings of curriculum resources. The direct URL to the monthly "Digital Dozen" is: http://www.enc.org/weblinks/dd/ and if you don't happen to visit before the end of the month, you'll still find Math Cats in the April 2001 Digital Dozen archives through a link at the bottom of that page [or this link: http://www.enc.org/weblinks/dd/archive/0,1577,4-2001,00.shtm]. It is also fun to play "Digital Dozen Roulette" and be introduced to a site chosen at random from the archive of Digital Dozen sites.

* PRIMARY MATHEMATICS

Math Cats received an effusive review in the Spring 2001 issue of Primary Mathematics, published by the Mathematical Association in the UK. Modesty prevents me from quoting too extensively, but here are a few excerpts:

"A site created for children - wonderful design, amusing, amazing - emphasis on design and mathematics, but many other aspects included... The site was created only last September by Wendy Petti and is a one-person operation, but it is already a tremendously innovative and quite amazing place to visit... From this write-up you might get the idea that I'm very impressed - it gives a new meaning to WWW - Wendy's Wonderful Work!"

* WASHINGTON TIMES

Math Cats was featured in the March 11 Family Times section of the Washington Times newspaper. The feature begins:

"English logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1917, 'The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.'
A former teacher with no web-design experience has taken this quotation to heart and started a one-woman crusade to make mathematics a dazzling display of fun. Trying to concentrate less on the mundane and more on the fantastic, her cyber-stop turns the study of numbers and relationships into an eye-popping adventure."

(... Well! My ears are burning! It is nice to know that Math Cats is appreciated!)

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     SPRINGTIME MATH FUN
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During this invigorating time of year, I like to spend as much time outdoors as possible, and I hope you do, too. But we can always keep an eye out for opportunities to enjoy math even while we are enjoying a beautiful spring day. Here are some ideas:

1) Outdoor estimation activities

* Look at a tree and try to estimate its circumference and its diameter,and then figure out how to measure it.

* Guess how many blades of grass might be encircled by a large rubberband dropped casually on a playing field or a yard, and then get down on your hands and knees and start counting!

* Lie on your back and watch a cloud moving past, and try to predict how long it will take to finish passing a treetop... then start a stopwatch!

* Measure your shadow at different times of day.

* Try to locate the largest and smallest blooms on a flowering bush or in a garden bed, estimate their dimensions, and then measure them and compare.

2) Charting changes in the air

Children as young as Kindergarten can learn to enter data in spreadsheets (and/or record daily numbers in a list, if a spreadsheet program is not available). You can help the children in your life to set up a spreadsheet to record data and display it with a simple graph which will automatically reflect changes when you update the data. What sorts of data? Here are just a few ideas from an endless supply of possibilities:

* daily temperature highs and lows
* daily changes in the pollen count
* the time of sunrise and sunset each day
* the daily growth of newly-planted indoor or outdoor plants from seeds or seedlings
* daily changes in the length of time it takes to run from here to there
* compare the height of bouncing balls on pavement, dry soil, moist soil, and/or grass

But we do also need to keep in mind the wise words from the "Inchworm" song:

"Inchworm, inchworm,
measuring the marigolds,
you and your arithmetic
will probably go far.
Inchworm, inchworm,
measuring the marigolds,
seems to me you'd stop and see
how beautiful they are!"

As always, I welcome your input on 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!)