Sunday, August 26, 2007

Thoughts on Math Topics

I have a lot of ideas about cool, practical, topical math lessons and I need to put them down somewhere. That somewhere might as well be here, no?

Water bottle math. These things are made from oil, they're filling up landfills, they're not very cost effective to recycle (when compared to aluminum) and we use billions of them. How many do we use in the US? In the world? How much oil would we save if we stopped using them? How much energy would we save?

Plastic bag math. Same kinds of questions as above.

Oil/energy math. Talk to district energy czar, Rick. Get some numbers from him or web site for national energy manager group for schools.

Can we power our own computers using bicycle generators?