On Facebook, we're looking at the XQ Super Schools Project, a priority of Emerson Collective. This was after I brought up the generic idea of charter networks latching on to at least some of the New England / New Scotland (Nova Scotia) stuff, transcendentalism if you will. Alexander Graham Bell and family were the New Scotland residents. His interests had turned to aeronautics after the big invention for which he was most known: the telephone.
You may have seen me on Youtube in my obscure (esoteric) channel, telling the story of Bell and his kites, based on this book I'm reading, having mined it for pictures. Bucky Fuller is mentioned throughout, as another genius who came upon the same discovery by a different route. I'm talking about the octet-truss of course. What charters teach that?
Not that one needs a charter or that you have no right to experiment even if you've been stereotyped as a "traditional" school.
Friday, I was out of my usual ruts in North Portland, finally visiting the latest digs used by Saturday Academy, by now the thirty five year old institution. You'll find I go way back regarding Saturday Academy in these blogs. We talked about Martian Math some more. I showed up with what's left of those cardboard polyhedrons made by Russell Chu and Trevor Blake and myself. Some of those didn't survive to the end of 2017. Plus I took some C6XTY to the meeting.
Where we stand today in Python World, is Visual Python, a flagship spatial geometry add-on, is starting to work well with Jupyter Notebooks, a core technology in my virtual classroom. We might be able to give high and middle school age students some experience with these tools. The Martian Math stuff is very polyhedron focused.
C6XTY consists of plastic soccer-ball like spheres held in a semi-rigid lattice per the octet-truss arrangement, ditto Alexander Graham Bell's design for kites, towers, other structures. Is it that he didn't patent the thing? One might think that Fuller's gaining a patent on it later might have necessitated bringing their contributions together, and making Bell's work known to Fuller. Apparently these connections got made only later.
Will a "super school" teach me anything about A, B, T, E and S modules? In this flavor of spatial geometry, we employ the octet-truss as our home base conceptual scaffolding, not the XYZ all-cubes lattice of Descartes and Fermat. It's not like we can't use both. Indeed, in converting between the unit volume of the "IVM" (the octet-truss skeleton) and the unit volume of the XYZ coordinate system, we encounter S3, a specific scale factor, or "currency converter".
Quakers (Friends) have their history as school makers. Schools have to be more than brick and mortar buildings, a physical campus, to survive the exigencies of time. They need "schools of thought" to inhabit them, give them life. What ghosts might we attract over time? What frequencies? Obviously, I'm reaching back to reach forward.
