It's math, so how should I use technology? How about an online graphing calculator or a game? No, I found a brief video of a cartoon about Eratosthenes that was created in 1961 which is an excerpt from IBM's "Mathematics Peepshow." The video focuses on the work of Eratosthenes to determine the circumference of the earth during the time when the earth was thought to be flat. The narrator also lists a number of the accomplishments of Eratosthenes, among them his sieve, but more on that in a minute.
I created a PowerPoint presentation that animates the actual sieve. But the most difficult part was figuring out how to add a YouTube video to a PowerPoint slide without using a plug-in. I found the directions here: WikiHow YouTube in PowerPoint and followed them, and it worked. Whew!
Back to the Sieve of Eratosthenes. I used the animations offered by PowerPoint to implement the sieving process. At the end of the presentation, I show a useful application of the idea of the sieve for finding the factors of a number.
A little history, a little sieve, and something useful. Math, it's for thinking.
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