Asians

Several years ago I thought it might be a good idea to get workshop participants to rearrange the syllabus into different orders. To this avail I cut the subject guide up into individual statements and stuck them on card. The exercise didn't go down to well but it had taken me so long to make the cards that I kept them anyway. In recent years the card have taken on a new role in the TOK game. I shuffle them up, deal some out and ask participants to link TOK to the words on the card. e.g. "Ohm's law". How we use Laws in physics , a law that applies to Ohmic conductors, the use of mathematical models, simplifying nature by holding all other variables constant etc. All interesting aspects that could be linked to TOK. I reckon it's possible to make an interesting TOK link for all of the cards although I haven't actually gone through the pile and done it yet. I don't go around looking for TOK links in everything but  can't help spotting the physics. On Saturday I was attending the Asian day show at RCN and noticed the wave pattern in the back of the Chinese dragon, I tried to film it but the bit I captured had the dragon running round in circles which although it looked like a wave wasn't really since it was the dragon moving not the disturbance. There was one moment when there was a pulse moving though the dragons back, that would've been a nice example but I missed it. Also in the show a student from Thailand  played a traditional musical instrument whose name I can't remember. What caught my attention was that it seemed to only have two strings but one tensioner, so the different notes would only be a result of different string thickness not tension which would be the same. I was wondering how this instrument would be tuned so  went to have a closer look and discovered that there are in fact two tensioners. Not such an interesting instrument after all.

Here's a video some of the students made. .