Transformations in Shaun White and Tetris

Two weeks ago I had a bad cold and didn't come in for my normal Tuesday appearance in Ms. Tran's class. I came in the following week, and I was surprised to receive a "get well soon" card from my 2nd hour class, which was really nice. It feels good to know that I was missed by at least a few of the students to take the initiative to do something like this. I had no prepared presentation last week, so when the students had 10-15 minutes for in-class problems at the end, I walked around the room and helped them with their work. I was planning to come in yesterday to make up for the missed week, but when I woke up I had a beautiful email from Ms. Tran informing me that it was a snow day in Ypsilanti! Snow days are awesome, and the great University of Michigan should start having them - it was a wonderful day until I realized that I'm still responsible for doing research, so I went into (my) school anyway. I'll make up my missed day in two weeks (barring any more distractions).

Today I came in with a discussion on degrees of freedom in design, which I think was crafted quite well and fit in with their unit on tranformations. I was planning to open up by talking about the game of Tetris, but I got an email yesterday about Engineers' Week, which gave a fun fact about snowboarding that I thought was more exciting. So I opened my talk with the video of Shaun White's victory run in Vancouver from last Friday, which was awesome. A lot of the students had already seen this, which was good because I think it drew them into paying attention as the talk was about something interesting, and for those who hadn't seen it, they got exposed to an exciting and quasi-important international event. After we watched the clip, I shared with them a bit about the history of the snowboard (straight from the E-week email), stressing the engineering effort and genius that has gone into the modern snowboard. I then went back to my original talk and brought up a screenshot of a Tetris game. Fortunately, almost all of the students had seen this game (I wasn't sure if it was too outdated, but apparently not), and I was able to get someone from each class to explain what the game was about. I was able to get it out of them that the player actually ROTATES and TRANSLATES the pieces into the desired position. I then asked how this might relate to something that people do in real life, and in second hour a student actually replied with the word "packing", which was exactly what I was looking for. So I showed them a picture of a moving truck packed with boxes and a car trunk packed with suitcases, and almost everyone was able to relate to either moving or packing a trunk for a trip. We talked about how you have to rotate the boxes and suitcases in all different directions and translate them to different locations so that everything fits. I told them that this is a problem that people are studying and talked about how a guy in my research group is working on optimization algorithms to do just that: find the optimal way to pack items of different geometries, particularly all the stuff under the hood of a car. From here, I introduced the idea of "degrees of freedom", and after explaining what they are I gave them a few examples and asked them to tell me how many degrees of freedom each object has: an elbow, a cd, a car on the road, and an airplane in the sky. This brought about some good discussions, and I helped them get to the right answers in the end. I concluded by asking them how many degrees Shaun White has on a snowboard, which we pretty much agreed was the most he could possibly had at 6.

The talk went really well in second hour. There were no significant distractions, the students seemed fairly engaged and attentive, I had students participating that don't always participate, and the examples at the end got them more into it. Third hour also went very well, and there weren't any instances where I asked a question and got no response (which is sometimes the case in third and fourth hours). In fourth hour, which is always the most difficult, Ms. Tran had a talk with the students about respect and listening right before I started my presentation, which I think had a slight positive effect on their behavior. The students were fairly responsive to my questions, and they come up with some good answers, though it still got out of hand with the talking a few times. Sixth hour was also a bit chatty today, and they asked a lot of questions - to the point that it became obvious that they were just trying to waste time so that they couldn't get to the lesson. Ms. Tran eventually cut them off, but I probably should have cut them off sooner. I need to make it clear next time with sixth hour that I am not here to waste anyone's time, and that those types of questions are disrespectful. Despite this, I think that this was an overall successful exercise with a very clear link to what they are currently studying in geometry, and I'm happy with how it went.