The representative from Stratasys explained they do have an interest in education because there is a lot of STEM interest in 3D printers. The video says as much as a 1000 words that I could say about 3D printing, so check it out below.

The pace of my posts on TPM has slowed the last couple of weeks. There are multiple reasons for that, including other internet projects I’m working on, but the main reason has been I’ve been very focused on something special I’ve been doing at school.

I don’t often post in specifics about my day job at Morton on here, but on Saturday something happened that was so exciting that I can’t pass it up. In addition to being a math teacher at my school, I’ve also coached a variety of activities through the years: volleyball, WYSE, chess team, and what has become my favorite, the math team. On Saturday, my students turned in an amazing performance at the Illinois State Math Team Championships to win the school’s first ever state title.

Since we took over in 2006-07, my assistant coach Joel Zehr and I have been striving to help our team catch up to a very dominant squad, the team from the University of Chicago Lab School. Just to gain admittance to that school, students pass through a rigorous admissions process and their families pay nearly $30,000 a year to send them there. Of course, the school also has the backing of one of top universities in the world, the University of Chicago. This is not only one of the best schools in the state, but in the entire country.

By contrast, our little public school in the middle of a Central Illinois cornfield is a pretty humble setting even within our own conference, despite the fact that we are generally considered one of the better “downstate schools” (those outside the sphere of Chicago and its suburbs).

UC Lab had won every single state title since Joel and I started working together, some of them by extremely wide margins, for a total of 5 consecutive state championships. Before that, another selective admission school from Chicago, Walter Payton College Prep, had won the title 3 times in a row. Needless to say, it’s hard for the “little guy” to compete in this activity. That said, we knew based on the scores in the state qualifying round back in February that we had a chance. Our result there ranked #2, just 3 points out of first.

Our goal on Saturday was clear: attempt to stay close to even in round 1, the individual round, which is usually worth a little over half the points. Then take a strong lead in the round 2 cooperative events and hope to hang on through round 3, another strong round for them.  UC Lab usually dominates the individual round 1, and even though we had beaten them some years in the later rounds, the deficit from the individual events was always much too great to overcome.

And so, on Saturday, we were feeling  confident when found ourselves tied with the great team from Chicago after 1 round 404-404. Finishing first overall in Algebra II and Pre-Calculus had compensated for a weak finish in Algebra I. But rather than put up the kind of strong round 2 performance we were expecting, we stumbled a bit, ironically putting up a weaker score in the calculator team event than we normally would (apparently, we had temporarily set our Nspires set to float 3 rather than float 4, which caused some rounding mistakes). The first half of round 3 wasn’t disastrous, but didn’t help, and with only the relays to go, we trailed by 26 points.

Unlike most of the other events, the standings from the relays aren’t released until the awards ceremony. While we had no idea what the other schools had done, we knew we’d put up a monster score. Our old record in the relays had been 76 points. On Saturday, we scored 118. While we felt good about that, the tests do vary in difficulty quite a bit from one year to the next. Maybe, we worried, UC Lab’s scores were just as strong as ours. But when the relay results were announced, we realized the momentum had shifted. Our freshmen had recovered from their weak individual performances to help the two freshman-sophomore relays finish 1st and 2nd overall. The junior-senior relays were almost as a good, with a 1st and 8th place finish.

A few minutes later, it was official. We had scored 794 points to UC Lab’s 775, becoming just the second downstate school ever win our division. A celebration broke out that didn’t truly stop until our bus was greeted back in Morton by a police escort and the team parents.

The TI-Nspire Factor

Obviously, I talk about graphing calculators on here a lot. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what a huge part of our success the TI-Nspire CAS has been. Almost all of the events in our Illinois competition do allow graphing calculators. Back when we started coaching the kids for the 2007 season, we were primariliy using a combination of the TI-89/TI-92, which we liked, but they just weren’t as intuitive to the kids as we wanted them to be. When we saw the Nspire CAS demonstrated in detail by a T3 teacher, we knew we had to make the jump. Obviously, they aren’t cheap . We actually did an annual car wash every year for four years to raise the money to buy Nspires for the team. The administration also helped us by finding money in the budget for a few of them along the way.

Hours training the kids on their calculators the first couple of years became minutes after making the change to the Nspire. Instead of spending their time learning calculator syntax, they spent their time using the Nspire to problem solve.  A lot of factors have gone into our gradual but consistent climb up the rankings the last few years, and it’s impossible to say how much exactly is due to graphing calculators. We’ve also constantly refined our training methods, have very supportive colleagues in our math department that have tweaked the curriculum when the competition exposed weaknesses, and have an amazing group of students that continually pass down the strategies they’ve learned as new students join the team. But I will say this–The margin of victory on Saturday was very slim, and I don’t think we would have pulled it out without our TI-Nspire CAS’s. The kids proficiency on them gave us the extra advantage we needed to clear that last hurdle and win state.

UPDATE: I didn’t initially realize Texas Instruments had posted the release notes for OS 3.2. They’re very detailed and explain all of the new features coming to the Nspire.

I finally got a chance to do a LeapPad review. It’s something I’ve wanted to take a look at for a while, and I finally realized that one of my friends has one. He was easily persuaded to loan it to me for a few days.

The LeapPad has been a hot toy since last Christmas time, when it became difficult for a lot of people to get their hands on one. While I heard a lot of positive feedback at that time, I heard some negatives too: slow response time, small viewing screen, low resolution camera, etc. Having played with it myself, I think those complaints are valid, but only if you’re comparing it to an iPad. I can’t imagine kids will even notice what they’re missing, but will instead focus on the positives of a fun game system that encourages learning at the same time. Besides, the LeapPad costs a tiny fraction of what an adult tablet costs.

If you’re not familiar with the LeapPad, I’d break down the kinds of things you can do with it into a few major categories.

Books

eBooks on the LeapPad emphasis real reading skills. The tablet will read the book out loud to your child, but the words are also displayed on the screen and are highlighted as they are read.

Videos

I watched a little Dora on the LeapPad I was working with. This was a hit and miss experiment. The video quality of Dora was pretty low, noticeably different from anything else I did with the LeapPad, leaving me to wonder if the problem was with the LeapPad or with Dora. Dora also looks pretty crummy on Netflix, so I can’t say for certain what the quality would be of other videos on a LeapPad.

I can say, that you can skip around to other parts of the video almost instantly, which I really appreciated. Just touch the screen and drag the progress bar, and you’re done.

Camera

The LeapPad tablet does feature a camera that allows kids to take still pictures or video. Yes, the resolution is fairly low compared to a real digital camera. Most kids won’t even know the difference, as they can take pictures that are easily recognizable to show their friends and family. It’s very easy to use, just point and shoot.

Games and Apps

Leapfrog is really known for their educational games, and the games I tried out on the LeapPad were indeed very good. In addition to a variety of games based on popular movie, tv show, and story characters, there are also apps that allow you to interact with the tablet in other ways, like drawing.

Bottom Line LeapPad Review

The LeapPad tablet isn’t perfect, but as far as kids toys go, it’s pretty amazing. It’s easy to recommend for parents of young kids, especially homeschoolers.

Click here to get the LeapPad tablet at Leapfrog.com.

As Texas Instruments has continues to make the TI-Nspire line their premiere line of calculators, the hacker community has started to gain interest in the Casio Prizm, calculator that seems to generally be seen as more friendly to programming efforts. Casio seems to be gaining a reputation as being less concerned about locking down their calculators than Texas Instruments

The first addition to the Casio Prizm (review), is the Tetris, long the game that has been the standard for determining if a calculator is ready for “prime time” gaming (and by prime time, I mean study hall). I’ve posted the video of this below. I have to say that Tetrizm, as it is officially named, looks really well polished for a first release, with great use of color and graphics in general.

On a more serious note for teachers and students, these devs have also given the Prizm the ability to graph in 3D. This is a really nice capability, especially when you consider that the TI-Nspire has had 3D-graphing capabilities since OS 3.0 was released last spring. Check out these great screen caps from Cemetech:

Credit to both of these hacks goes to “Kerm Martian” and “tifreak8x.” To learn more about the work being done by the programmer community on the Casio Prizm, you can visit their Prizm wiki site.

Click here to get the Fridge Phonics toy from Leapfrog.com. 

In a bit of a change from the kinds of reviews I normally do on Tech Powered Math, I’m reviewing an educational toy for little kids. My wife and I had our first child 16 months ago, and she’s starting to get interested in these kinds of toys, so I plan to add more Leapfrog educational toy reviews as well as toys and games from other “edutainment” manufacturers.

The Leapfrog Fridge Phonics toy is simple, but fun and effective. The toy has two functions. First, you can have it play the alphabet song. Second, you can insert any of the magnetic letters that come with the toy, and it will sing a simple song about the sound that the letter makes.

This toy is recommended for children ages 2-5. Rachel is only 16 months old, but she really likes it already. Obviously, she doesn’t understand it on the level of a 3 or 4 year old, but she does try to sing along with the alphabet song (even though she doesn’t make it past “C” yet).

I’ve posted a video review on my YouTube channel which you can view below.

Anyway, in the months since, she has proven to be a quick study, rapidly moving through Pre-Calculus and on to AB Calculus. We are planning for to do a BC independent study next fall. At this rate, I’ll be able to retire by them time  she’s 10 since she should be a CEO of a company by then.

OK, you could say she's accelerated, but she still asks for help on differential equations.

I’ve put together simple video tutorial on how to change the rechargeable battery on the TI-Nspire CX (or CX CAS). You won’t need anything but a set of mini screwdrivers and a new battery. As I say in the video, this is a fairly simple procedure which I’ve done many times without any problems. However, any time you take the calculator apart, there is a chance something could go wrong, so proceed at your own risk.

You could end up needing to do a battery pull for several reasons. Sometimes, the Nspire is acting strange, and a factory reset doesn’t do the trick. I’ve also had occasions where the battery meter reading 25% when the battery was actually completely charged, and a battery pull seems to reset the meter.

On the other hand, if your old rechargeable battery is shot, it’s not expensive to change out for a new one. The same battery that works for the older TI-Nspire Touchpad models in grayscale will also work the the CX models. Here is is on Amazon for under $20, which is the norm. If you’re more of an Ebay shopper, you can get it here.