Maths Project Ideas for Students: Pocket Calculator Design

[Huma waseem]

Hello !
i am Maths teacher in School
Regarding maths project could u people guide me what kind of projects can be made, As the students are not very good at and use to with the project work... i ve started with Survey analysation and than summerization of the data using begginer stats, IQ test etc.. but now i am looking forward to give some practical work like to design simple pocket calculator .. i searched a lot but can't find a single site where i could know the general operationed ( addition substration division and multiplication ) based circuit of calculator be designed !
I want to have your suggestion if calculator designing in limited budget or due to some other reasons can be difficult so what may be the right choice for such purpose ... ??
Regards

 

[vk6kro]

I have seen calculators on $2 pencil cases. How could you possibly match that?

At best, you might get calculator chips which already have the logic built in. Building a calculator would just be a matter of wiring up switches as a keyboard, adding a display and the students would not learn anything.

Would you consider making data loggers which could be placed in some location and record data like temperature, sunlight, soil moisture etc over a day or so and then be brought back to a computer to download their data?
I would think of using Picaxe chips, which are available for about $5 US (and up for better ones) in some countries.

These chips are programmable in a simple Basic language and it would be possible to incorporate some statistics into the data collection process and in the computer when the data is downloaded.

If you recorded one reading every 15 minutes, these chips have about 200 bytes of onboard memory so you could record for about 50 hours of 8 bit data or 25 hours of 16 bit data.

If you like this idea, you could read about these devices at:
www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/

 

[waht]

I'm not sure what level of your students is?

Chua's circuit is a nice demo on chaos theory, and sensitivity on initial conditions:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chua's_circuit

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Chua_circuit

here is a youtube demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RPfuoVRakM&feature=related