Two Fun Videos for Pi Day

Today is Pi Day! Here are a couple of fun Pi videos to start your day.

Set to the tune of Don McLean's American Pie. (Note, there is another version of this Pi song. This is the cleaned-up version of the song).



And this Pi rap is set to a slightly more modern tune. Go ahead and lose yourself in the digits.

Mathnet on YouTube

I Tweeted this last night and it got reTweeted a bunch of times so I thought I should share it here for people who missed it. When I was in elementary school I really enjoyed watching Mathnet on PBS. For those that aren't familiar with it, Mathnet was part of Square One which was a show designed to teach math lessons in a fun way. I did a quick search on YouTube for Mathnet and sure enough many of the stories are available in their entirety on YouTube. I don't know what kind of copyright restrictions are or are not being broken by the people who uploaded the videos, so I can't say if the videos will be up forever. In the meantime if you want to show an episode to your students or just want to feel a bit of elementary school nostalgia, I've embedded a few episodes below.







And who can forget Mathman?!

Numberphile - Videos About Curious Number Facts

Numberphile is a neat YouTube channel about fun number facts. There are currently thirty-three videos in the Numberphile collection. The videos cover things like 998,001 and its Mysterious Recurring Decimals, Pi and Bouncing Balls, and 1 and Prime Numbers. I've embedded Pi and Bouncing Balls below.

For some reason these videos reminded me of the old Mathnet show that I used to watch on PBS in the 80's. So of course I had to see if Mathnet was on YouTube, it is! A quick search for Mathnet on YouTube will take you to multiple full-length episodes of Mathnet. Here's the pilot episode.



Applications for Education
Numberphile's videos could be a fun way for students to explore and learn some fun facts about numbers. Perhaps you have a student whose thinks the way I did in high school, I wasn't good at math, but I did like and still do like fun facts about numbers (or any fun fact about anything). A fun number fact could be the "hook" to get that student interested in an aspect of mathematics.

LearnZillion Math Videos Now Available in Mastery Connect

Disclosure: Mastery Connect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

Among other things related to Common Core standards Mastery Connect hosts an active community of teachers who are sharing lesson ideas built around the Common Core standards. Now you can also find more than 300 LearnZillion videos in the Mastery Connect community. LearnZillion videos provide math lessons tied to Common Core standards for grades three through nine.

Applications for Education
If you would like to include a video element to your classroom lessons, take a look at the LearnZillion videos found in the Mastery Connect community. If you're not familiar with the Mastery Connect community, here are a few highlights: As a member of the community you can browse and download the materials shared by other educators. As a member of the community you can share your own materials. All materials found on Mastery Connect are tied to specific Common Core standards. You can also follow and have threaded Twitter-style discussions with other members of the community.

Learn About Physics Through the Circus

In 2010 PBS aired a short series called Circus. Circus was a documentary about the Big Apple Circus. The show took viewers behind the scenes of a traveling circus production. All six of the episodes are currently available to watch online. Today, through a Tweet by Danny Nicholson I learned that the Circus website offers some short circus-based physics lessons.

Circus Physics is a series of eight short videos. Each of the videos features a circus act that demonstrates a basic principle of physics. Each video clip is accompanied by text and image explanations. I've embedded the Newton's Laws of Motion video below.

Watch Circus Physics: Newton's Laws of Motion on PBS. See more from Circus.

PEMDAS Math Rap

A couple of weeks ago I shared Rhyme N' Learn's Don't Let Pi Make You Cry math rap video. This week they released another math rap video. The new video reminds students about the process for solving long equations. The video explains PEMDAS (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction). The video can be viewed on YouTube and if you really like it you can buy a copy of Rhyme N' Learn's CD.



And this PEMDAS song is definitely not a rap, but is certainly catchy.

The New Boston - Great Videos for Learning Computer Science and More

The New Boston is an educational website and YouTube channel that I recently discovered while reviewing the EduPort Android app. The purpose of The New Boston is to share instructional videos and tutorials in the areas of computer science, computer programming, mathematics, science, robotics, and much more. Think of The New Boston as Khan Academy for computer science. For students who are interested in programming, The New Boston offers an active discussion forum in which they can ask questions.

One of the channels within The New Boston that jumped out at me is the Android app development series which contains 200 instructional videos.

Here's a sample from The New Boston.


Applications for Education
The New Boston could be a great resource for students who want to learn programming on their own. The New Boston could also be a great source of supplemental materials for the courses that you teach.