Making Cents

One of my favorite activities with students is asking them to calculate how many pennies it takes to cover the floor. Take ~20 pennies, a ruler, some string, and go crazy.

Well, this person really figured it out:

I would want to show kids this picture and have them generate questions that come up. Some questions that come up for me:

• How big is the floor? 
• How many pennies? 
• Are there more dark-side-down or light-side-down pennies? An equal number? 

Beatmaker

I got this idea from some amazing student teachers!

Using the Beatmaker from splice.com, they had us come up with beats using different instruments that hit at different times. What I thought was really cool was that we had to draw the pattern ourselves before we played it on the Beatmaker. There was a lot of thinking about how to mix and match patterns for different instruments, and what kind of visual patterns would result in what kinds of sounds.

I feel like there's a lot more to do with it, but I haven't investigated yet!