Curriculum Resource: Edible Mobius Strips

There is only one day left in the fundraiser for my friend Maria of Natural Math, who is trying to raise $6,200 for a community-based initiative to help parents, caretakers, and preschool teachers to introduce deep math concepts to children from infants to age 5.  Since the deadline is so near, we kind of have mobius strips on the brain (because the name of the project is Moebius Noodles).   We are thinking, breathing, and eating mobius strips...

And I mean that literally:

Yes, tonight's dinner consisted of edible mobius strips, made out of handmade pasta, courtesy of my brilliant son.  He is the one who had the idea of showing our support for the Moebius Noodle projects by making mobius strips out of actual noodles!

So we made some dough and pulled out the old pasta rolling machine:

Then we rolled out the dough, cut them into strips, and joined the ends of each strip together in that paradoxical inside/outside form that is the mobius strip:

It took quite a while, and it seemed like we had made 6,200 pieces of pasta, although I imagine it wasn't quite that many:

I had also made a homemade tomato sauce out of the fresh tomatoes and peppers from our local farmers market, combined them with some turkey meatballs, and VOILA!

Mobius Marinara!

And I share all this, not only because it is fun, but because it demonstrates the potential of the Moebius Noodles project.  First, I doubt my son would ever have had this idea without his exposure to Maria, because let's face it--cool things like Mobius strips aren't covered that much in traditional math curricula. Secondly, it illustrates the way that Maria makes math fun and concrete and real life in a way that works for children of all ages.  Sure, my son is a middle schooler, but toddlers could enjoy making a meal of mobius strips just as much.  Finally, Maria's concept for Moebius Noodles is to make it a community project, not just her personal product.  She wants to publish the ideas under a Creative Commons license, which means it would be free for others to use and adapt.  She also wants to make it a open web-based program where everyone can contribute ideas and resources.  So my son came up with this project, which was fun and worked out really well and which we are glad to share with others.  But what might you or your children come up that would not only work for your family, but might really benefit others--if you had a way to get it to them.  THAT is the idea behind Moebius Noodles--not simply a book or a commercial product, but a vehicle by which we can all access and add to the community of ideas about teaching even our youngest how to use and enjoy math.

So as of the time I'm writing this (10:00 PM on Monday, September 19), we only have 24 hours to raise the remaining $2,500 for this project (remember, with Tipping Bucket, if the entire sum isn't raised, all the money goes back to the donors).  So if you have been meaning to donate, but haven't gotten around to it, now is the time.  And whether you donate or not, stay tuned to developments with the Moebius Noodles project.  Maria wants your educational ideas and experience as much, if not more, as she would like your money.

Entrepreneurship in Education

I have been thinking about entrepreneurship a lot lately.  I think this is mainly due to three educational initiatives I'm currently working on:  (1) a summer entrepreneurship camp targeting youth at risk; (2) a summer camp/potential franchise operation to create educational programs for students with attention deficit disorder/ADHD; and (3) an ambitious middle school coop for the next year that will require substantial fundraising and entrepreneurship to raise the money to create some significant community awareness of the topic of the coop (which happens to be preserving our ocean resources).

It turns out that Chris Lehmann has been thinking a lot about this topic as well.  Lehmann is doing so because he is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.  The Science Leadership Academy is a partnership high school between the public schools in Philly and the Franklin Institute.  Between what I know about the museum, which I did visit once, and what I read on the school website and on Lehmann's often-thoughtful blog....well, if you have to go to school, this looks like a pretty cool school to go to.

In the opening paragraph to his blog post on Entrepreneurship, I think the way Lehmann defines entrepreneurship is brilliant, especially as it relates to education:

I've been thinking a lot lately about entrepreneurship. People tend to immediately assume that means business, but I don't. Entrepreneurship is part of SLA's mission statement. But it's the part that oftentimes is - I think - hardest to see if you don't know what you're looking for. In the end, its about owning your ideas and doing interesting things with them. And I don't mean "owning" in some sort of proprietary non-sharing sort of way because collaboration is a huge piece of entrepreneurship. I mean owning your ideas in such a way that conveys that your ideas have power and have meaning and have use. Ken Robinson in one of his talks defines creativity as, "having original ideas of value." That's not a bad place to start. Entrepreneurship suggests that when you do something with those ideas.

Having important ideas and doing something interesting with them--that is certainly the basis of all three projects I mentioned above.  But, really, shouldn't that be what all of our educational endeavors should be leading students to do?  To think great thoughts and then to take action on those thoughts in a meaningful way--what a great way to think about the ultimate goal of our interactions with students.

So crystalizing that idea for me is a great gift from Mr. Lehmann's post (which you can read in its entirety here). But another gift was a TED video suggested by one of his commenters on the topic of teaching students to be entrepreneur. This was PERFECT for me, not only because it deals directly with what I'm doing in the entrepreneur camp and the ocean project, but because it makes the link between entrepreneurs and ADHD, which the presenter calls "the CEO's disease." Plus, at the end, there is a 2 minute animation that was so inspiring that it had me in tears. Here is that TED talk by Cameron Herold:



I'm just so grateful for the insight provided by Mr. Lehmann and Mr. Herold that I wanted to pass it on to all my readers.  I think it is a critically important concept that we need to nurture more in our educational endeavors, both inside and outside of school.

UPDATE: I decided to add the entrepreneurship video on its own, because I think it can be a useful educational resource by itself.