2013 Maths of Planet Earth
This section is for projects in 2013 for the Maths of Planet Earth (MPE) global year project, especially in Australia. While the activities will also come under the MPE’s overarching aims, one of which is to Increase public engagement with mathematics, they will also have long term and other applications due to their foundation in Mathematics which is not restricted to one year.
As my overall aim is to contribute to the vision of the United Nations Decade of Biodiversity 2011-2020, this being its third year, most activities will aim to be use Maths with living things. Hence my Shape Sleuth Activities for using this basic concept and ones that follow from it, to take greater notice of our environment.
What link is there from previous environmental education projects to 2o13’s one with its focus on Maths? from Literacy to Numeracy in Nature shows how I see the link in the context of the introducation of the Australian Curriculum, my 2012 projects and the United Nations Decade of Biodiversity.
In 2010, I ran environmental education projects in the Wimmera based on the International Year of Biodiversity, in 2011, on the International Year of Forests and in 2012 on the Australian Year of the Farmer and the National Year of Reading. Some of the resources and materials created for these are on this website. They tended to focus on literacy and visual arts for communication, but as they also use some Maths, they could be adapted to focus more on the Maths that was involved in them. Many of the ideas are written up in the quarterly articles in Otherways, the Victorian Home Education Magazine. The articles are also on this website.
Shape Sleuths for Living Things – My first activity links the above projects with an activity that could be done at a wetland and so could also support World Wetlands Day.
Shape Sleuths for Machinery – links Maths with History with the 2013 School theme for National Science Week – a Century of Australian Science , in this case Machinery Inventions for Crop Farming.
