I get to present to the 52 Living Ideas folks, an online study group, about Synergetics in Schools this evening. Once the recording appears, I'll embed it up top.
My plan is to start where Casey House left off last time, on April 30th, embedded below. He took us on a tour of his Synergetics University website, showing as a link to my website from his Resources section.
I'll start from there and jump to Synergetics on the Web, my site from the 1990s which I preserve "as is" while continuing to develop curriculum in other venues. I'll talk about my chronology, prototyping here in the Silicon Forest, right up to the present day.
Thanks to Saturday Academy, I've had several opportunities to teach Python programming in conjunction with various kinds of mathematics. I've always been a "math through programming" kind of guy, i.e. lets blend the two topics already, given high school is more about overview than getting specialized. Ever since Guido van Rossum's Computer Programming for Everybody (CP4E), the idea that learning to program could be as common as learning to drive, has been mainstream.
However, given another passion of mine is Bucky Fuller's approach to geometry, embedded in philosophy, yet not theosophy per se, yet metaphysical, and definitely Americana, I'd molded the Python component to be about polyhedrons.
How would you mix Python and polyhedrons?
Most obviously, there's the ray tracing angle, i.e. actually rendering 3D spaces as stills, or as animated GIFs with successive frames. I also experimented with Visual Python, also known as VPython, which led me to hypertoons.
Hypertoons consist of morphic "time tunnels" (scenarios) running between keyframes, in directed graphs through which the playheads wander. I did a dual playhead prototype with Fuller's concentric hierarchy of polyhedrons my central focus. I also furnish my Coffee Shops Network bars (in the planning phase) with hypertoon reveries on the screens.
With my middle and high school aged students, though, I developed a different blend of maths and science fiction I've dubbed Martian Math. I like the alliteration there, but ET Math might do as well. There's a storyline in the background of humans (Earthlings) and ETs making contact and choosing to collaborate on some project.
One might imagine on a space program, however these ETs want to focus on hydroelectric power generation, because this is the Pacific Northwest and Silicon Forest is all about affordable hydro-power.
I think I'll weave in at least three Silicon Forest based personalities to further regionalize my presentation. I'm thinking of Doug Strain and Linus Pauling and how those two did a lot to create an ambient culture, one running counter to reckless militarism. Then I'm thinking of Sam Lanahan, a personal assistant to Buckminster Fuller and the inventor of Flextegrity.
Pauling helped Americans learn the truth about nuclear weapons testing, the environmental and health effects, even short of testing them in an actual war time scenario.
Strain, himself a pacifist, founded one of the big companies in our region, and funneled funds towards keeping Pauling's legacy alive. I was a beneficiary of his largess, in getting to attend the Linus Pauling Memorial Lectures which Silicon Forest industries supported, via ISEPP (Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy).
How about autobiography? Will I have enough time to squeeze some of that in? Yes, I intend to emphasize my trajectory from Princeton through Jersey City, around the east coast (including the District), and back to the west coast (Portland) to have a programming career and raise a family.
Mostly I'll tour my Martian Math websites, and then show my School of Tomorrow and Elite School repositories. We'll also look at what I developed for Winterhaven (a Portland public school) when my daughter was going there, although she wasn't in this class.
I fully realize, through years of Math Forum debates (mostly on the math-teach forum) that my views are to this day considered exotic and esoteric. Neither one of those attributes is in itself a turn-off however, and tomorrow is another day.
No mathematics faculty that I know of has embraced Fuller's treatment of the polyhedrons, which starts with a different model of 3rd powering and a unit volume unit edge tetrahedron.
I've been pressing the American Literature angle, suggesting that if you have not heard of Grunch of Giants, you have not encountered one of the critical works in that syllabus. We might find book clubs based outside the Lower48 that do more to propagate American culture than those in the censorious inside.
