Day 1

Math Review

Today's studying started with daily math review. The topic today is comparing distributions with dot plots. It's pretty easy and just takes some thinking about what the dot plots mean and making deductions from them. See the video below.

Math review is going pretty well. I finished Basic Algebra on Khan Academy last week, and I'm 65% of the way through general 7th grade math today.

Comparing distributions with dot plots (example problem): Sal examines two distributions in dot plots to draw conclusions about the times of Olympic swimmers.

Study Habits

One of the most highly recommended books for developing study habits for learning things math and science related things right now is Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if you Flunked Algebra). My copy just arrived from Amazon. My local libary has several copies, but there is quite a wait list for them and I wanted to start reading it right away.

So today I'll give my impressions of the first chapter and do a chapter at a time. The first chapter is called "Open the Door." It begins with some autobiographical details for the author Barbara Oakley. The gist is that Dr. Oakley did not get good grades in math growing up, and more importantly, believed she wasn't capable of being good at math even if she tried hard at it. There is an implicit critique of the way people think about math and science education here: People may not believe it, but anyone can be good at math and science with the right approach and practice. Dr. Oakley faced a career transition from Russian linguistics to electrical engineering and eventually earned multiple advanced degrees. Now Dr. Oakley wants to draw on neuroscience to suggest strategies for anyone to learn math and science topics. 

This is basically the framework that she will expan on in the coming chapters, but as a little teaser, she does suggest that the human brain is designed to do tons of complex mathematical calculations quickly. For example, a person playing baseball may not realize all of the complex mental calculations they are doing to hit a ball with a bat. The hardware is there, it just takes practice and learning the right lingo.

So far I'm totally on board with the book and am excited to delve further into the coming chapters.

JavaScript Drawing

This is my first JavaScript drawing using animation. The sun gets bigger and bigger until it fills the canvas.

Challenge: Exploding SunMade using: Khan Academy Computer Science

All in all it was a pretty productive day. See you all tomorrow.