Mass Reading in Various Classes
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| Mass Reading in class VI, VII, VIII |
Wednesday 25 September 2019
For your Knowledge
75 educational resources to help kids learn about space
Around 13.8 billion years ago, a big bang set in motion the creation of space, matter and everything in existence. About 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth came into existence. And then came humans.
Stephen Hawking said: "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious."
These educational resources for students will help satisfy some curiosity, whether in the classroom or at home.
Many of these resources can be applied across STEM and STEAM classes; set for homework; or used to expand students' imagination.
Each resource is listed with the year-level it aligns to in the Australian Curriculum, but most will appeal to students of all years – including adults!
There are brilliant resources from NASA, Catalyst, BTN, the experts at The Conversation and the ABC archives, including high-quality videos, cool games and explainer articles that answer students' most frequently asked questions about space.............................More
Thursday 12 September 2019
Friday 6 September 2019
For Your Knowledge
Can people live in space?
The short answer is yes, but it’s really, really difficult.
Humans are great at living in tough places. Even before we developed modern technology, we had spread out to live in all of Earth’s continents – from the really cold areas in North America, Europe and Asia to the hottest parts of Australia. But there are still lots of places on Earth humans can’t normally survive – like underneath the ocean or at the South Pole.
Those places are dangerous – without protection, you would die in seconds or minutes. But, thanks to modern technology, we’ve worked out how to live there. People can live for months at a time under the oceans or down at the icy South Pole.
How do they manage it? Well, they find a way to make the conditions there more like what we’re used to at home.
To live underwater, people build submarines. They’re warm and dry inside – perfect conditions for people to live in. People take food, oxygen and water with them into submarines, and use electricity to power lights and heaters. In other words, they change a cold, dark and dangerous place (deep beneath the ocean) into something like a home.
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| People live at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station all year around – even during the six month long Antarctic night! |
We do the same at the South Pole. We build special buildings, and dig tunnels, and make them warm and dry. The people who live there take food and water with them, and there’s extra heating so people don’t freeze in the Antarctic winds and ice.
But you can’t live in these cold, dark places forever. Humans don’t cope well if they don’t get enough sunlight, so they do need to get back to “normal life” after a while. And it’s really expensive to bring all the food, water, air and energy to these places.
Life in space
Space is very dangerous – and without protection, people would not be able to survive there. In space, there’s no air – so you couldn’t breathe. It’s cold – so you’d freeze. And there’s lots of nasty radiation (from the Sun, and from the rest of the Universe), so you’d get really, really bad sunburn. But despite all that, we have people living in space all the time!
There’s this amazing place orbiting the Earth called the International Space Station – and there are people who live there, all day, every day. You can sometimes even see it from your backyard, on a clear night!
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| This is what the International Space Station looks like, close up |
The space station is like a submarine built especially for space. A giant tin can filled with air and kept nice and warm – not too hot and not too cold. It protects the astronauts from the cold of space, gives them air to breathe and protects them from all that nasty radiation. We send up regular shipments of food and drink – everything they need to survive.
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| Here’s an astronaut on a space walk outside the International Space Station |
In other words, we’ve found a way to let people live outside Earth, and we do it by making the place we want to live just like home. Again, though, it’s not safe for people to live there forever, and being in space for a long time isn’t good for your body.
If people ever get to live on Mars or the Moon – or other places in the Solar system (and beyond) – it will be because we have found a way to make those places nice, safe and a bit more like home.
While living on the Moon or Mars sounds like science fiction, people are talking seriously about doing just that in the future. It would be very dangerous and really expensive. But who knows what the future holds?
http://education.abc.net.au/newsandarticles/blog/-/b/3245905/curious-kids-can-people-live-in-space-
Tuesday 3 September 2019
For your Knowledge
How was maths discovered? Who made up the numbers and rules?
The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they'd like an expert to answer. Bianca from Strathfield, Sydney, wants to know how maths was discovered. An expert explains.
We are all born with a brain that understands maths. So are animals, to some extent, but perhaps algebra would be a bit difficult for a giraffe – that is a long stretch.
Throughout history, different cultures have discovered the maths needed for tasks like understanding groups and relationships, sharing food, looking at astronomical and seasonal patterns, and more. There are probably forms of mathematics that were understood by people we don’t even know existed.
Many indigenous cultures worked with different time, measurement, and number ideas suited to their needs and had amazing ways of expressing these ideas. But there are some things that are very common, like counting.
There was an explosion of discovery of mathematics in different cultures at different points in time.
The Greeks didn’t really use algebra the way we do now, but they were amazing with geometry. I am sure you have heard of Pythagoras, but do you know of the woman mathematician Hypatia? She was an amazing teacher and writer, skilled at making difficult concepts easy to understand.
Unfortunately, she was killed for her ideas.
Not everyone had the number zero
The Romans were great engineers, but they had a terrible number system. It didn’t even have zero.
The number system used in ancient India had zero, but it was known by other very old cultures like the Mayans in Central America and the Babylonians (from ancient Iraq). And ancient Arab mathematicians not only knew about zero but also really spread the idea of algebra after the 9th century (the word comes from a text by a famous mathematician called al-Khwarizmi).
People in the Middle Ages in Europe thought fractions were the hardest maths EVER! One 11th century monk reportedly said, "After spending months working hard and studying, I finally grasped this thing called fractions!"
And in the 16th century, people thought negative numbers were pretty evil. They had other names for these numbers, like “absurd” or “defective”.
Numbers and patterns have always been there, waiting to be discovered
There are so many number systems! The ones you know were developed over centuries and we are still making up more now. But much of our maths is based on one system called “base 10”, which works on patterns of one to ten (that probably has its roots in the fact that humans have 10 fingers to count on). It’s also called the decimal system.
But there are lots of other systems, like base 2 (also called the binary system) or base 16 (also called the hexadecimal system).
It sounds complicated but they’re just different ways of organising numbers. Numbers have always been there, waiting to be discovered and so were different ways of organising them.
And over time, humans in various cultures have noticed patterns that emerge in numbers and developed mathematical systems around them
Breaking the rules
There are plenty of other rules in mathematics, but they are based on recognising patterns and wondering if something works that way all the time. Let’s look at these two equations:
3 x 2 = 62 x 3 = 6
You’ve probably learned that it doesn’t matter if you multiply three by two or two by three – you always get six, right? That’s a mathematical “rule” called the “commutative law for multiplication” (“commute” means to move around).
But what if there were some maths worlds where that didn’t happen? Well, there is a certain type of maths, called “matrices”, that was discovered in the 19th century, where you get a different answer, depending on which way you multiply.
Why would anyone want to do that? It turns out that this type of maths is really useful in many different areas, including airline travel and engineering.
You may even end up being a famous mathematician that discovers more maths, creates more rules or makes up some more names.
About 100 years ago, a mathematician called Edward Kasner was trying to think up a name for a huge number: 1 with one hundred zeros after it. He asked his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, who suggested “googol”.
So, Bianca, why not think of a name for a new number? Or look around at some shapes and ask yourself what you might name it?
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