Stanley Cup Geographic Center

We're approaching 100 years of the Stanley Cup being awarded to solely to the NHL champion. After two years of the Florida Panthers winning, they did not make the playoffs. The geographic center of all Stanley Cup winners has not moved very far - it's now 500 miles from the first winner, while the most recent winner is 1500 miles from the first winner and 3000 miles from its furthest competition.

https://editor.p5js.org/timteachesmath/full/HxzDydkz1 
 

Zingo

 The bar was set pretty high with the kids' game Spot It and several analyses followed:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTDKqW_GLkw
  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/math-card-game-spot-it-180970873/
  https://mathcircles.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/SpotItPuzzleEdited.pdf
  

On the other hand, there's Zingo. Three copies of each tile exist, and gameplay proceeds like Bingo except only one player can claim a called tile. 

The game has six green cards and six red cards; the green cards are advertised as having fewer shapes in common. However, the pair on the right shares five of nine, more than nearly all pairs of red cards! Meanwhile, the left pair shares only two. The player with the left card has a definite advantage. 

This game would benefit from better cards.

Room for squares

 

Fixed Lengths and Angles

 

Political Parties and Sports

Of the last 30 Super Bowl winners, 18 had Republican Governors, and 18 had Democrat Presidents.

States with NFL teams don't have significantly more Democrat governors.

See also, Election 2020: Inside the political donation history of wealthy sports owners.

Cross-hatch

 

Top Big Band Albums

Composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue announced 30 + 30 Essential Bigband Recordings. Half of them predate the Grammy for large group, but still I expected more in the union of these sets. 

The most popular thing I have ever Tweeted, bar far, was the thread of 30 Essential Bigband Albums that I posted last year. It’s time for a sequel. https://t.co/w10iINZr2z

— Darcy James Argue (@darcyjamesargue) September 6, 2023

My Euler diagram is obviously loose. You can find Miles, Miles + Gil, Miles + Quincy, and Quincy separated, as well as ghost bands separated from their originals, but otherwise I didn't fret too much over different recordings or eras representing the group. 

Highly Composite Numbers

 A highly composite number is a positive integer with more divisors than any smaller positive integer has. Here's my visual representation, a rare example where I feel I can justify using a log-log scale. Graphed is A000005 in black with the highly composite numbers A002182 in red. 

Mega Bloks

Mega Bloks tolerate some rotation that we can use to escape the Euclidean grid.

 

Their dimensions allow a convenient 22.5 degree rotation.

 

Thus, circles and rounded right angles are possible:

 

But we don't have to use the maximum, as they tolerate up to 22.5 degrees. So, we can approximate a sine wave:

What else can we create?

Rep-tile

 

Synonyms and antonyms

Some interesting insets:

Lay down and take down can both mean to record.

 

In/out and off/on are antonyms, but off and out both can mean abnormal and sit in and sit on can both signify inaction.

Up/down and in/out are antonyms, but give in/give up and down/take out can mean the same thing.

And the full graph: 

synonym	synonym	in the sense of
give in	give up	resign
give up	lay down	relinquish
lay down	take down	record
take down	lay out	tackle
lay up	down	disable
down	take out	defeat
make	take in	earn
make off	take	steal
sit in	sit on	mull over
off	out	abnormal
lay off	stand down	stop
make up	sit down	settle

antonym	antonym	in the sense of
give	take	offering
give off	take in	emissions
take in	give out	criticism
give out	stand	reliability
stand	sit	position
on	off	switch
off	stand up	fashion, norms
stand up	give up	fight
give up	take on	possession
take on	lay off	employee
give up	take up	hobby
take up	sit on	take action versus table
sit down	take out	restaurant
down	up	direction
in	out	enclosure
lay on	take off	add/remove
take off	stand off	develop/stall

New app game

My take on this app game: https://editor.p5js.org/timteachesmath/full/J9Jz1hOue

Spreadsheet goals

How would you use spreadsheets in math class?

My response . . . 

 Two capstone projects to demonstrate proficiency after teaching a unit on spreadsheet formulas: a multiplication table, and the chaos game.

To this tweet:

I have several days with my algebra 1 kids. I'd love to do an "intro to spreadsheets" lesson.

Anyone have one they love before I make one?#mtbos #alg1chat

— Justin (@JustinAion) June 7, 2022

Other responses: 

•  https://whatifmath.org/ 

• https://im.kendallhunt.com/HS/teachers/1/1/index.html
• https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/googlespreadsheets/ 

• https://applieddigitalskills.withgoogle.com/c/en/curriculum.html 

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c&feature=emb_logo 

•  https://mattcoaty.com/2017/02/09/random-numbers-and-sheets/ 

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1We3DifBFFlc8RqH_wiZXtKMB_IpzZfEm5W1dJvHGbG0/edit  

•  https://spreadsheetsolving.com/curriculum/beginner/

•  https://passionatelycurioussci.weebly.com/pixel-art.html

 

Stop

Frederickson, Greg N. (1974). More geometric dissections. Journal of Recreational Mathematics 70). 206-12. Bay-wood Publishing

A board game

 @oneplusepsilon created the board game THREE N PLUS FUN. I made an online version using p5.js:

Dissection

From Dissections: Plane and Fancy 

Swirled Series

I made three submissions to Craig Kaplan's Swirled Series.

 

Darts

 

Tiling

 

Rhombii

And the follow up: