Ulaanbaatar, MongoliaThursday, April 1, 2010
It's "Book Week" at school this week, and I've had it at the back of my mind that I should try to find a way to incorporate a book reading into my class somehow. At the same time, I am teaching matrices and on Monday the cry went up from my students: "What are these things good for?!"
Inspiration hit yesterday: I would read to my students from one of my favorite books of the past five years (Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War by Leo Marks) and we would use matrices to write and send secret messages to one another.
Today in class all secret messages were received--and decoded--using matrix algebra. The activity (no fooling) was a big hit--except for one pair who used irrational numbers to set their encoding matrix.
WHO says math can't be fun?
For an explanation of the math, click here
