[IAEP] How can we help kids get into the habits of looking for all possible causes and counter examples to problems?

[Gary Martin]

On 3 Oct 2011, at 18:35, Frederick Grose wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 12:58 AM, <nanonano at mediagala.com> wrote:
> >On 02/10/2011 09:07 a.m., Maria Droujkova wrote:
> >...I have never had to do anything with REASONS for seasons or phases of the moon, outside of curriculum design. Have you?
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> One reason to think about  phases of the moon on our normal life is the fact that people on the north hemisphere see the moon "upsidedown".  Or the opposite: people on the southern hemisphere see the moon "upsidedown".
> 
> We can use that knowledge on our normal life: On the calendar we can see the icons of phases of the mooon, but those icons were designed by northern people, with  the crescent moon like a "D" and the Waning Moon like a "C", but in the southern hemisphere is the opposite, crescent moon is a "C" and waning moon is a "D". (the people that designs calendar on the south repeat like parrots the things that northern people designs, so they draw the moon in the opposite way....)
> 
> In northern hemisphere the mooon is liar, because she is a "C" when she is "de-crescent", and she is a "D" when she is Crescent, but here on the south the moon tell us the truth.
> 
> -----------------------------
> 
> For example: a child in Uruguay could take a picture of the moon and send to a child in Canada,  the same day, so they can compare that fact. and  maybe another child on the equator  can send another picture that shows the moon on the middle, like an "U".
> 
> This suggests that in Gary Martin's Moon activity,
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Moon
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/sugar/addon/4034
> 
> the hemisphere toggle control should instead control rotation of the view between the north and south extremes.
> 
> That might help you if you wake up in a strange land and need clues to  your location.

Thanks for the feedback, unfortunately it requires 1) correct local time, 2) reasonably accurate longitude and latitude position, and some rather complex maths for calculating/using the positions of the Sun, Moon, Earth and your position on it – I have some of this math/code but it is not so accurate, current data in Moon is generated from 1min accurate public data tables provided by NASA (including Luna eclipses and Solar eclipses).

Any one know of some python based Open Source compatible source that is available? When I've previously dug about for an existing solution, I've usually ended up discovering things based on property blobs we could not legally ship/publish.

Regards,
--Gary

> 
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