Category Archives: parenting

Doppler Drum Corps

Posted on April 7, 2019 by Andy Rundquist

One of my favorite oral exam questions to give students in introductory physics classes is to ask them whether marching bands should worry about tuning because of the Doppler Effect (lots of details below but the short version: if there’s … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, general physics, mathematica, parenting, physics | 6 Comments

What are integers

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Andy Rundquist

This morning over the breakfast table my family had a great conversation about integers It started when my youngest, L (5th grade), talked about his math test tomorrow. He said the whole chapter was easy and that he wasn’t worried … Continue reading →

Posted in math, parenting | 4 Comments

Best bingo board

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Andy Rundquist

My son is in the third grade and his math homework is to play games. The other night we played one that really got me thinking. Each player makes a 4×4 board and puts in any even number between 8 … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, math, mathematica, parenting, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

unbalanced 20-sided die?

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Andy Rundquist

My son recently bought a 20-sided “spin down” die. Here’s a similar one: It’s really useful in the game “Magic The Gathering” because you use it to keep track of your life points. My other son and I, however, were … Continue reading →

Posted in fun, mathematica, parenting, physics | 2 Comments

>leaf update

Posted on November 1, 2009 by Andy Rundquist

>It appears that one lawn bag holds between 40,000 and 50,000 leaves. The boys have renegotiated for $1/bag from now on. They’re not dumb, those two. here’s the description of the project

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>Leaf math

Posted on November 1, 2009 by Andy Rundquist

> The leaves have definitely fallen and I’m going to have my kids do some counting for money. I figure $1 for every 100,000 leaves should do the trick. Of course, it only counts if they get the leaves in … Continue reading →

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>Cereal with less than 10 g of sugar

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Andy Rundquist

>In our continuing efforts to keep the kids healthy, I’ve decided to enforce a hard threshold of less than 10 g of sugar per serving in their cereal. I came to that number mostly arbitrarily but it’s worked out pretty … Continue reading →

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>My new diet

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Andy Rundquist

>I’m trying to be a little more healthy this year so I’m trying to follow my new diet more closely. It’s actually very simple: if it’s homemade, you can eat all you want. I figure that all the weird preservatives … Continue reading →

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>Books my kids read

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Andy Rundquist

> We’re using Google Spreadsheets (and the cool built-in form generator) to keep track of the books we read. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pUaHxoDA2HpDxe5FU6lY0QQ&output=html&gid=0&single=true&widget=true

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>Reading for tv

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Andy Rundquist

>We’re trying to keep our boys from just watching tv all day here at the end of vacation. We’ve gone to having them bank tv minutes by either reading or playing outside. So far today they’ve cycled through reading for … Continue reading →

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