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 This pictures are seeing from a fly in my kitchen.

It was.....

shine spot on the plant.

my favorite spaghetti

a scary flyswatter

Module4 How do I love thee?

My content is about heat transfer. The essence of the heat transfer can be the shape of the air movement and the different directions in it. I made an analogy between the invisible directions of air movement and visible letter spreading (which is happening between two different temperatures.) As a result, the shape and the color of the poetry provide us the typical image of invisible phenomena (heat transfer). 

Module4 What's the big idea?

From Sparks of Genius, abstracting is a process beginning with reality and using some tool to pare away the excess to reveal a critical, often surprising essence. Artists do it; writers do it; scientists, mathematicians, and dancers do it (p90). They reduce complex visual, emotional ideas to bear, stripped images, revealing through simplicity. Thus, obstructions may not represent whole thing but one or another of their less obvious properties. To understand obstructions, we need to see the material with our mind, not our eyes to find the hidden properties behind the obvious ones. For example, if we see our hands through an infrared camera, it can be a good example of abstracting humans’ body heat. Since the infrared wavelength is longer than visible light, it is not seen by human eyes. However, by the inferared camera, we can observe human’s body heat in a very different perspective. This image eliminates the complex visual details and any other function of body heat to reveal the essential quality of magnitude and distribution. As infrared imaging was a big discovery in the science field and has been used in many ways (flame detector, medical testing, firefighting operation, chemical image and so on), it has been proven that the simplest abstractions can yield the most important insights which can help to approach the essence of a problem in a different perspective.

An alogizing is also a very important tool in the creative thinking process. In the most general sense; analogy refers to a functional resemblance between things that are otherwise unlike (p137). Despite that correspondence happens inexactly and imperfectly to something, it provides us useful insights into the real phenomena. How does it help us? When we try to learn one context that we cannot directly and physically sense, we can try to fill the gap between the visible, sensible knowledge and the indirect knowledge by making analogizes of them. Thus, analogizing helps us make the leap from existing knowledge to new worlds of understanding. They reveal not mere resemblances but unapparent relationships between abstract functions, one of which is understood, the other not (p143).  For example, to explain the convection phenomena of the earth, we can use the analogizing. It is hard for students to understand invisible big scale convection phenomena in the atmosphere, but they can observe the process the way a large wheel might turn exchanging air above and below . The round wheel does not look exactly like convection phenomena in the atmosphere, but through the resemblance of visible reaction, the unknown new knowledge has a corresponding visible image so that in can be more easily studied.

These two thinking tools have a similarity. Both of them deal with one certain property of the entire object. From the one property, the real essence of the object can be discovered in a number of different perspectives and provide us new aspects to be studied. To make students more familiar with these two thinking-tools, students can be encourage to find out the essence of the context and practice comparing this essence with other well known objects with their functions.            

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 Image 1

 Image2

Image3

My topic is heat transfer in everyday life. I chose a stove top to show two different types of heat transfer.

Image 1 is abstractive expression of convection phenomena around the hot stove top. To emphasize the direction of air movements, it has curving lines and circular textures through simplicity in color.

Image2 and 3 are about radiation phenomena. Both of them are heavy in the center and show straight and strong line from the center. It explains that the central objects are the source of energy and this energy emits the light.  Also the changing temperature around the stove top is expressed by each different texture.      

Module3 How do I love thee?

Existing pattern

This pattern is created by applying the hit to the heating plates. By the changing temperature, the gas density on top of the plate changes shape. This pattern is found by two dimensional observing (in this case we are using a technique called ‘Schlieren Imaging’), which helps us to understand the relationship between heat convection phenomena and the changing of air density which occurs as a result. We see that there are more irregular lines and circular structures as the temperature is increased.

New Pattern

We can come up with a new pattern by looking at the density of the air at a single location. Plot this pattern by a graph which shows the relationship between the air density and time. This plot will result at a lower temperature (below)

We can compare this with a case where the temperature is higher and the frequency of the fluctuations in the air density is increased.

These two new patterns help us to guess the air density in any certain point in temperature without real temperature measurements. Also we can form new patterns by extending 2 dimensional patterns to 3 dimensional patterns like below.

Observing this new 3D pattern can help us think about the structure of air density and the relations between the circles and lines as the temperature changes.

Module3 What's the big idea?

There are simple and complicated patterns almost everywhere around us. In a piece of art, music, writing, their own patterns exist. Recognizing patterns means that not only do we observe these random events carefully, but also we understand them more deeply. Furthermore, we can anticipate what the next event will be from the structure of these patterns. This means that we try to fit our new observation and experience into our anticipations. Although it is challenging, it is possible for individuals to understand relatively simple repetitions in something to recognize a combination of several different repetitions collectively. Mathematicians, scientists, and artists are very good at perceiving patterns and understanding relations between these patterns.

Forming patterns means combining two or more elements with operational functions. This can involve combining two or more elements together with rhythms and dynamics to explain the new patterns and its new functions. It can be done by using different senses as well. For instance, a pattern which is discovered by visual observations can be combined with other patterns which come from other types of observations from other multi sensory patterns.  

For example, we can apply heat to water with sawdust in the beaker to see the direction of the water due to the heat transfer. If we can find certain movement patterns of the sawdust by visual observation, this can lead to finding the patterns of heat transfer. Then, we apply this technique to different water temperatures and characterize them to see the frequency of fluctuation at a single position. The frequency can be found by observing the intensity of the sawdust with respect to time. This process can be considered as looking to seek new patterns, where the patterns visual dimension is now switched over to patterns in the frequency dimension. Also this new pattern has its own functions and can be used in various ways as well.

The concept of recognizing and forming patterns is a useful thinking tool for everyday life also. We can practice this while trying to find repetitions and irregularities in our daily lives and try to classify these two parts by the relationships between them so that we accept a certain situation with various unique perspectives. Thus, we can be creative every day, even though we live our lives through a routine pattern.

We can make the most use of this thinking tool in education. Training students to observe something with wide open minds and trying to grasp the basic structure of it is very important for recognizing patterns. To develop this ability, students should be encouraged to create a big functional structure with various small parts and to find something similarities between two or three different fields (e.g. find out something in common between the drawings and the songs). To develop the ability of forming new patterns, the efforts to find out the best way of communicating with others should be strongly required. Students can be encouraged to develop their own patterns from existing patterns so that they realize what kinds of patterns influence their actual learning process to be easier and more creative.       

Module3 Zoom-in

This is the image from Google map. This is a very familiar pattern to those who live in the Lansing area.

Do you see what I see here?

This is Lake Lansing!!!