Thursday, February 15, 2007

To Teachers: A Little Fun with Math

Challenge students to figure out at what temperature the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales meet up. In other words, at what temperature do we use the same value in both scales?

Here are formulas and a website for more background, The website has background and ideas for introducing the conversion to students not yet familiar with algebraic notation.

To convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius:

Tc=(5/9)*(Tf-32)
Tc=temperature in degrees Celsius Tf=temperature in degrees Fahrenheit
(* means multiply; Tc means temperature in celsius; Tf means temperature in Fahrenheit)

To convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit:

Tf=(9/5)*Tc+32
Tc=temperature in degrees Celsius Tf=temperature in degrees Fahrenheit

http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/weather/fahrcels.html

2 comments:

192011 said...

i cant belive how cold it is up there and hope that you are having fun in the cold weather

P. Cereghino said...

Yea Jana!
I am so glad it is only -37 C. Digging sounds like a vary good idea at that kind of temperature.

I found two fascinating links -- both of which play with numbers and paint a context for human-induced climate change:

1. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
A fascinating man that does some wonderful number games with exponential growth. The concept of growth (expressed in %) permeates our adult culture.. economic growth, population growth, growth in energy demand. If something is growing at 7% (like energy demand) how long does it take to double?

2. Some beautiful pictures that illustrate large numbers of things... eeek!

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use" -- Galileo