Mr. Heise
Robotics!
We’ve had a busy and rewarding week across all classes. Students have settled into strong routines, shown resilience in challenges, and supported one another as teammates and learners. Between robotics projects, math investigations, and group problem-solving games, there is some great thinking happening here.
We had a good moment in robotics where the students were discussing palindromes, prompting the question "How many palindromes exist between 1 and 1,001... or 10,001... etc.?” We figured it out theoretically then brainstormed how a computer might do this for us... i.e. by checking whether the end of a string is equal to the beginning and wrote a little Python program to find palindromes in the first 10,001 numbers. This led to some other speculation about what we could compute, so we printed the first 100 lines of Pascal's triangle in Python. (That one's a little tougher, so the students did speculate the idea of adding the row above, but I forgot how to code it and went with a binomial coefficient approach P(n,k) to get the same effect.)
Our self-driving car project is coming along nicely and this week we soldered a couple more resistors and inventoried the rest of the parts.