Any High School-Level Activities for Video Feedback and Chaos Theory?

[Esnas]

Some of the high school students where I work have shown interest in video feedback (affine transformations) and fractal geometry. I once saw a video where some people at Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology) were doing some experimentation with video feedback. I don't know what became of it. Anybody out there doing something with video feedback or has information about it? How about any activities in chaos theory or fractal geometry that would be appropriate for high school students? I would appreciate hearing from you.

 

[pervect]

NASA is planning some very interesting space missions with chaos theory, and it's the basis for something that has been called the "Interplanetary Superhighway".

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/lagrange.html

has some links

They've also used the IPS to design a Jovian "Petit Grand Tour" mission to visit four of the Jovian moons on a screwy trajectory that has it oribiting each moon a certain number of times and going on to the next, using little or no fuel.

It has been shown that Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the one that crashed into Jupiter, was following one of these chaotic IPS orbits through a Lagrange point. Apparently there is some evidence that the dinosaur-killer asteroid followed one to Earth.

I found the IPS to be an interesting application of chaos theory... you heard a lot about it in the '80s and early '90s, it was very faddish, then you didn't hear much about it anymore... this is one application not just for pure science (e.g., stability of the solar system), but applied science (transportation within the solar system).

A detailed treatment would probably be outside high school level, but that's a general problem with anything in chaos theory.

 

[Esnas]

Thanks pervect. I've started reading John Baez's article on Lagrange points. Looks interesting.