Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Brainstorming for math poster ideas

My son has a math night coming up where the kids are supposed to bring a poster illustrating something about math. (Yes its that wide open) I'm trying to brain storm ideas for topics at about the 5th grade level that would be fun and make a good poster. So far I've thought about doing something with probability and testing how likely in monopoly it is to land on boardwalk starting at go, or an illustration of pick's theorem with nails and rubber bands. Does anyone else have some good ideas for us?

Thanks
Ben

Last year, in 3rd grade, my youngest did a probability poster dealing with M&Ms (probability of pulling a certain color - there is information online about the distribution of colors). She handed out small M&M packets to each kid. Of course, it might not work with the small packets, but we also bought a very large bag of M&Ms to see if it matched the information online.

Middle kid did a poster for her confirmation project on Fibonacci sequences in nature. I don't know that the minister liked it, but a church member who was a former math teacher thought it was great.

Fibonacci sequences make for great graphics.
Geometric proof of pythagorean theorem is always cool to look at.
Pi. Several different circles, show that the length of each diameter wraps around its circle exactly Pi times, regardless f the size of the circle. Lots of fun ways to do this.
Mobius strip.
Those are the first that come to mind.

I think 5th graders could be taught the Haar transform, so I'd probably do something on that. Maybe start with a publicly available picture of Ingrid Daubechies like the one on wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Daubechies

Then apply an averaging filter in Gimp, as well as an edge detection (difference) filter. Show both results, and maybe make something like this
http://s.eeweb.com/members/elsie_li/discussions/2012/11/10/figure-1352604976.png

The Haar transform is really easy to understand. All you really do is recursively replace a series or matrix of numbers with differences and sums. There's a tiny bit of scaling to get right, but it all comes down to the realization that 2 numbers can be represented by their sum and their difference.

I think your Monopoly idea is a great start. I could see a picture of the Monopoly board with all sorts of statistics and probabilities all over it; like % Chance to land on a square, average total dollars paid to get out of jail per game, probability of drawing a Get Out Of Jail Free card. The two of you could brainstorm all sorts of numbers to include with some formulas on how some were calculated.