Sunday 16 August 2015

Google or Googol???

If you Google the term "mathematics", you will get 284 000 000 responses (I assume the search engine rounds this number to the nearest million when it returns such a large number of results!!!). Google will also tell you how long it took to find this staggering amount of information - just 0.36 seconds in this case!).
What an interesting concept!
 
When we talk about how easy it is to find information using all of the resources we have at our finger tips - how often do we stop and look at the little number at the top of the screen???
And while we are on the topic of Googling things - check out where the name comes from (think googol) and then spend a little time exploring that as well (or better still... ask your students!).
Information has never been so easy to access, share and contribute to. However, the mathematics to be found in this is also amazing!
 
Take the time to check out how many results are returned (and how quickly) next time you search for something. This might just start a whole new round of searching as well!!!
Letting our students explore numbers through Google empowers them to drive their own learning and is a great way to extend children who are starting to explore larger numbers. I wonder what the largest/smallest number of search responses students can find would be???? Can they order the number of results from smallest to largest??? What about how quickly they were found???
 
Turn your next search into a mathematical one and let us know how you go!
 

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