Maths Excursion Inika Weber
At the end of last term, five girls participated in the ‘ChooseMaths – women in STEM’ excursion. We went to the Mawson Lakes campus of UniSA, where we listened to two wonderful speakers, Dr Lisa Schultz and Dr Bronwyn Hajek. We engaged in a range of activities, showing where we use maths in our everyday lives. These activities included, undoing a knot using maths to find the formula of rotations and twists; working out the fraction of a triangle out of an origami flower; as well as working out the way computers use code and algorithms to store information. In the first activity we had to work as a team to knot and unknot a rope. At first glance this might not seem very mathematical, but we knew that a twist was +1 and the starting point was 0, so we had to work out the value of a rotation. By testing our equations with different amounts of twists and rotations, we discovered that a rotation was equal to the negative of the reciprocal. In the second activity we made origami. We made a box and then a flower. Similarly, this may not seem very mathematical, but we looked at the implications of things being able to fold like this using an example of the space industry. There is not very much room on board a spacecraft, so they have to make things such as
solar panels as compact as possible. However, to run satellites and space stations you need solar power and therefore large solar panels are vital, this is where the skill of origami comes in. If the panel can fold to be as compact as possible when it is inside the spacecraft and as large as possible to gain power outside, maximising the potential and minimising the constraint. During this activity we also looked at how to work out the fraction of the smallest triangle in the flower. There were many different methods and answers found to this, making us notice how many different ways you can find a result. Some of the answers were also slightly different, due to the imperfections of our flowers. The final activity was looking at how computers store information and specifically pictures. We looked into the importance of binary code and learnt different methods of how computers compress images to take up less space. We learnt about how there are algorithms to shorten the binary code so that something may become 4, 2 instead of 1,1,1,1,0,0. We then tried to do this ourselves, with worksheets where we had to find out what the picture was as well as identify the error in one line in the code. Overall, I really enjoyed this experience because it made me think more about how maths is subconsciously used in our everyday lives.
