Maths for biology

Designed and produced by the French CoI

his c-book explores some mathematics useful in biology, in order to answer questions such as “is a whale heavier than the tallest tree on earth”, “how does this plant grow”, “what sort of spiral is it?”.

Dealing with approximations is an important pedagogical goal of this c-book unit. Many activities invite students to discuss and import inside their c-book elements from the outside world such as uploading pictures and data, in order to check whether the tools that have worked fine on some given examples can fit their own data... Cross-widget communication allows a geometrical measurement in Cinderella, to be compared with algebraic expressions in EpsilonWriter, checking whether an observed ratio is indeed the golden ratio or not. Open-ended questions related to modelling spirals can lead the students to experiment in a half-baked kind of micro-world where an algebraic expression gives rise to a spiral and the user has to find the formula that best fits its picture. 3D models of volumes allow understanding the formulae for the volume of a sphere, a cone and a cylinder, used in the model at hand.

Available in HTML5 at:
http://8.mc2dme.appspot.com:80/mcs/tablet/DWOplayer.html?locale=en#c:4907341954678784