B1 finished their posters today. And they did an awesome job. I’m so proud of them. And they all said they really enjoyed doing the whole project.
And here they are…
Group 1: Eddie, Kitty, Mary, Charlie and Hera (not pictured)
Group 2: Eric, Joe, Sally and Flora
Group 3: Lizzy, Betty, Martin and Sean
I’ve also created a page on the blog dedicated to the project.
B1 studies science with me two days a week. In their book, there is an easy science experiment to investigate what living things need to survive. For the experiment, we have three plants. One you take care of normally. One you neglect to water. And one you put under a bag as well as neglecting to water. You observe the plants for two weeks to see how they fare.
I’m not sure if I’m the best person in the world to be running this experiment. I’ve been known to kill plants just by looking at them. It was often joked when I was a pre-med student that once I became a doctor I would have to have artificial plants in my office. Because, of course, people shouldn’t trust a doctor who can’t keep plants alive. Regardless, we’ll see what happens.
I’ve decided that my students will make posters in small groups. I’ll probably have 4 groups of 3. I’ll be taking pictures of the plants on the days we study science. We’ll work together as a class to write the material for the posters. And I’ll provide the students with copies of the pictures as well as poster boards and class time to make the posters.
In the end, I hope to add an entire page to the blog with the results of their project.
As many of you know, I’m active in BOINC. One of the projects I participate in is PrimeGrid. It’s a project that helps search for prime numbers of certain types. I don’t even pretend to understand the math. I just know a prime number is one that is only divisible by one and itself (for example 3, 5, 7, 13…). There’s a bunch of different sorts of special primes that correspond to certain formulas. But like I said, I’m not going to even pretend to understand the intricacies of the math. I’ve been an on again, off again participant for over a year now. I come back to it for two reasons. First, the work units themselves are short (at least for the subprojects I’ve chosen). And second, Rytis, the project administrator is a genuinely nice guy. He’s a college student in Lithuania and his English is probably better than mine. We chat via IM at least a couple times a week.
A few hours ago, I noticed I had gotten an email. My in box has been pretty quiet over the last few days because of the holidays so I was surprised to see the email. I was even more surprised to see that I (well, my computer) had discovered a prime big enough for inclusion in “The List of Largest Known Primes“.
My prime is 28739399349*2^333333-1 and contains 100354 digits. It’s currently ranked at #4306. When I submitted it, they estimate that at the current rate of prime discovery it will remain in the top primes list for approximately 10 weeks. So I guess I get 10 weeks rather than 15 minutes of fame.
Just for fun, I took a screen shot of my current certificate of computation.
ESL Photos
215 | Unique Visitors |
