Many of the parts are a bit small to "tag" with numbers BUT they are color coded so we can do it by means of a chart with the already used colors....thanks for the idea.

She is already fairly familiar with many arthropods, so she won't mistake a scorpion for a crustacean (just teasing a bit). Scorpions are of the Phylum: arthropod, of the order of Scorpiones, in the class of Arachnida.   This makes them more like a spider then say a crab, lobster or crayfish (which aren't fish either).  

They are not very big with the one we are doing being of the family  Hemiscorpiidae, the genus of Hadogenes and the species being Troglodytes, the largest being around 20 cm in length (almost 8 inches) with the longest recorded one being 23  cm (a little over 9 inches long). 

The model we will be doing will be approximately 1/1 scale maybe being slightly but not very much, larger then the original.

 And, to explain two things in one paragraph, this child is a bit special.  She has Asperger's Syndrome which is a form of Autism, but displays a very HIGH function in a few selected areas.   This particular child, age 7, can name nearly every dinosaur that lived, and explain what their names mean, their habitat, food sources, living conditions and areas, etc etc.  She is great with human anatomy, insects (and arachnids i.e. spiders, ticks, mites, and......scorpions :-) .   She LOVES history, and is very knowledgeable about Roman history especially.   Don't forget, we are speaking of a SEVEN year old :-D   (around the same age I was dissecting batteries and taking tape recorders, etc. apart for parts LOL). 
She loves to construct robots and mechanical things (WE tend to like machines over some humans as humans can be fickle and odd at times, while a machine will never treat you badly on purpose;  I say we because I, my psychologist, and my family contend I have Asperger's Syndrome also).   Thus the abbreviation AS or as known among ourselves,  Aspies.  Some do not care for that rather less than onomastic name however.
And this also explains why I went into so much detail here.  My apologies if I droned on too long. 

Here is the ible, 99% finished (we got it put together, but I haven't put the mod in it yet).

Yes, and thank you for being one in a million....I wish I had had a teacher with even half your dedication and understanding when I was in school.

Reading your posts gives me a bit more hope for the students subjected to teaching these days (oh, wait, you're in Canada; never mind ...).

When I went through public school 30-40 years ago, all but one of my teachers were flexible, thoughtful, and focused on having all of their students learn as much as they could. If that meant spending extra time with the "slow" ones (yeah, we still used that term), or getting a textbook or box of "self-paced reading cards" from two classes ahead for a "bright" one, they would do it.

I don't think I was in any sort of exceptional place: I went to a lower middle-class public school in suburban California. But I got enough support that I still remember the names of several of my elementary and middle school teachers.

Thank you for being a big part of a critical profession!

I didn't see "support", sadly, until I was nearly 50 *sigh* I am glad also to see at least someone wanting to do it correctly.

I feel a bit discouraged in that I feel like I have had the first 50 years of my life wasted because I was not shown things "the way I learn". I have had to research and study on my own time. Being a "normal kid" wasn't an option, and now, being a "normal adult" isn't really either. Stuck doing computer operations in a world going automated; with an "engineer's mind" but the knowledge of an apprentice, I don't have the time nor the money to get an decent education any more....and the stuff I have learned on my own.....isn't detailed enough to get me employment.

PS: The image is fine once one clicks on it to get the larger version :-)

YW. I was good at geo/trig, and had many difficulties with algebra but that is because of my mental wiring. Abstracts that had no "immediate" use were hard for me to memorize.

Graphing can be kind of mingled with statistics can't they? Of course, numerical graphing.....using variables and proportions may insert a real difficulty. Polynomials will create a challenge I can't even imagine. :-) And quadratic equations will be most difficult (this is where I became "stuck" as my math teacher could not explain "how" they worked (proof). If I didn't understand it, I couldn't memorize it.

You wrote, "I want to educate kids to see that math is really just a set of tools that can be used to build and design stuff."

Hear, hear! One of my favorite engineering stories I remember from high school was the "Egyptian" method of making a carpenter's square (right angle). Take three straight sticks (like tongue depressors) and drill holes through them with distances of 3 units, 4 units, and 5 units. Use three of those brass pins to connect the sticks in a triangle, and the 3-4 corner will be "exactly" (within measurement precision) 90 degrees.

Can you concretize polynomials by using block patterns, or is that too "elementary" for middle schoolers?

I'm imagining using square (cubical :-) blocks as counters, and building larger squares and cubes out of them: 1 -> 1² -> 1³; 2 -> 4 -> 8; 3 -> 9 -> 27; and so on. It does get kind of unweildy after 5 or so, unless the cubes are fairly small (5 mm-ish).

You can graph polynomial equations up to 3rd order by working out the terms with blocks, then stacking them in lines on graph paper. Ideally you'd do it with expressions where the higher terms partially cancel (a line of ~100 5-mm blocks is awfully long :-).

Sketching a curved line to follow the endpoints of the stacks would also give a concrete flavor for interpolation (which the students could test by actually plugging in fractional values for x into a calculator, and compare with their lines).

Yes, very interesting! That's quite similar to what I was picturing in my head, except that I didn't take the pedagogical step of "locking together" the "x²" into a single object.

Interesting....so essentially though, only the smaller "orders" would need to be demonstrated. One could learn enough to see it in their head and understand it's function without the need for the visual in front of them for higher ?

That's what I was thinking. From what I've read, it's better to start with concrete examples and let the brain do the generalizing itself.

That would have suited me and my thinking processes in school really well. I was lucky enough to be in a school that allowed me to move into geometry after one year of algebra since they hadn't known of any real way of showing my visual thinking mind how to perceive quadratic equations.

Mike, you have my TOTAL blessing and support....I wish there were more like you around when I was a little striper (some 40 years ago). I am not going to sugar coat it though, the teachers I had couldn't "give me proofs" on how to work a quadratic equation, they'd have been even harder put to make them "pictorial" or "visual" in any way except the rote form of memorization to work the problems.


Hey ! THANK YOU for the link.....I have a youngster in mind that will LOVE this (as a 7 year old, she already creates 2-d origami like shapes on her own with triangles and square pieces).

A question (maybe I missed it on the site) but as I worked through the "houses" some of the little indicators became green some yellow. Do the one's that are yellow indicate that I am "close" ?

Thank you. I was finding the exercise very invigorating myself, but ran out of time before I could complete them all. I will have to make the attempt later on :-)

And indeed, if got me to think in ways I hadn't done for a long time :-) 

>waves<

Sounds interesting - keep me in the loop if you can (although I'm quite busy right now, starting a new job).

In the mean time, have a look at my "how to use instructables in school", especially the part where you can have a free pro membership.