Nick and Fiona's Math Chat

Why do some people hate math?
When you were in high school or middle school, did the sound of math make your mind freeze? A lot of people hate math, even though it can be an incredible tool for every day life. Our society has completely collapsed due to laziness. Global warming? People are too lazy to recycle. World hunger? People are too busy to give their time. If one million Americans picked up twenty pieces of trash a day for two years, approximately 15 billion pieces of trash would be picked up. Simple ratio. In America today, people are so lazy, they're now unable to think. Math, like picking up trash, isn't hard. It just requires some thought, which people today are apparently incapable of doing.

Do you like math or hate math and why? (before and after BTW)
As artists at Booker T, we have some trouble with keeping up with homework. While Nick and I both like math, we agree that both of us find it very time consuming. However, compared to our previous schools, math is a lot more fun and interesting at BTW. Math now makes sense. It's just sharpening the pencils, plugging in answers to the calculator, and taking out more paper that "doesn't float my boat."

Do you think math is important for "artists?"
One of the most major components of theater is hanging lights and setting sound and light cues. Every light on the stage is set to a specific angle in order to light the performer. While most audience members only pay attention to the performance, lighting takes so many hours to hang, set, patch, and cue, just to light that performer the audience is watching. Geometry is used when hanging every single light on stage.
Watch this video. The lights switch angles constantly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAayeUMABlY

How can math education improve?
Math needs to be made more fun. One of Nick's favorite components of math is using dry erase boards to find the answers to problems. Adults mistake high schoolers for being too mature for elementary and middle school activities.
I color my composition books. Nick likes dry erase boards. We make math fun by incorporating these middle and elementary school components.

Scatter Plots and Souffles

Most people freeze up at the sound of algebra, or anything hard having to do with numbers.
Why is that so? We can use this information to do tons and tons of things in real life, for fun, for work, and for efficiency. Like scatter plots.
I don't mean to sound too preachy about how great math is, since I used to be one of the naive, but data's a pretty interesting concept. If it looks like just a bunch of crazy calculator button pushes and some dots on a graph, apply it to something cool, like volcanoes, or souffles. With a different frame of mind, graphs can be easy, and lots of fun!
So. Scatter plots.
Scatter plots basically show the correlation between a bunch of different points on a graph. These points show data. A line can be drawn through the graph to show whether or not the points even have correlation, and if they're positive or negative. Simple, right?
In order to draw a scatter plot on your handy-dandy calculator, there are some steps you have to follow.
Let's make our own scatter plot. Back to souffles. Say you want to make some souffles. You don't know what temperature you want to bake your souffle for. At different temperatures, souffles rise and fall. If we put in a pan of 12 souffles for thirty minutes six times, at six different temperatures, what would the souffles' heights be at 400 degrees?
We can determine this by using a scatter plot.
Hit "STAT" on your calculator, then select 1. Edit, and hit "ENTER." Put in your six cooking temperatures into L1, the independent variable, and the height of each of the souffles on each tray into L2, the dependent variable.
Then, hit "Y=" and highlight "PLOT 1" at the top of the screen. Clear anything already in "Y1"
Hit "ZOOM" and select 9. ZoomStat, and hit "ENTER." This should plot all of the points from your experiment, with the temperatures as X, and the souffle heights as Y.
To complete your scatter plot,
Hit "STAT" and select Cal 4: Lin Reg (ax + b). Sound familiar? This gives you your rise over run, mx +b. Your calculator just calls it something else.
Once you have LinReg (ax+b), hit "2nd" and "1" for L1, "2nd" and "2" for L2, and "VARS", "Y Vars", 1: Function, and "ENTER" for Y1. Put a comma in between each one.
Your calculator should read: LinReg (ax+b), L1, L2, Y1.
Hit "ENTER."
Here's all your information. Go to "Y=" for your Y-intercept and line equation.
Check that your L1 goes all the way up to 400 degrees. You can check your table by going "2ND", "WINDOW." Set TblStart to 400. Then, go to "2ND", "GRAPH", which will bring you to "TABLE." Here, you can see what the souffle height would be at 400 degrees in L2.
Now, hit "GRAPH". There's your line and correlation!
Write down all of your data. There you go!
...And you thought souffles and scatter plots had nothing to do with eachother.