Wow! Two days without a blog post… you readers might find something more productive to do than ready my blog entries! To see what I was doing, visit my other blog.
This site, “Universal Leonardo” is really an amazing website. It’s interactive, visual, informational, and inspires curiosity.
It can be a nice little diversion in a traditional math class to show them that the problems they are learning to do have been worked on by many famous scientists and mathematicians before them.
For example, we were discussing Reimann sums last week in Calculus, and I just found the manuscript pages where DaVinci discusses “squaring the circle” using small pieces… it looks a lot like the principles behind our modern area by strips and volume by slices.
Perhaps the greatest lesson we could teach our students from this site, is just how diversified the interestes of DaVinci were. He was a life-long learner, a quality we hope to see develop in our students. He did not focus on one “career” but dabbled in a broad array of interests. This is, I think, what we are trying to achieve with a liberal arts education, but it is mostly lost on the students, who seem to be very career-minded these days.
Back to the topic at hand. There are eight trails that you can follow through DaVinci’s work:
- The body of earth
- The body of man
- Imagination and Invention
- Remaking Nature
- Forces of Nature
- The Natural World
- Light and Vision
- Rule of Mathematics
Guess where I started?
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- Understand in learning objectives – it’s the forest, not the trees
- Elaborations for Creative Thinking in STEM
- What should K-12 teachers be learning about technology?
- The Road Back to Higher Education
- 10 Books to Push Your Thinking about Learning Design
