Chapter 1 - Organizer Octopusses
Ver em Português
Leer en Español
Hubbard the Cat was sit on top of a fence. Yesterday, he told everybody that he was going to give a class, so today, at the appointed time, the kids all gathered around him and waited for him to start.
- We are going to talk about mathematics – said Hubbard.
- Oh, mathematics is complicated and weird – said one of the kids, Mingus - It’s all about numbers!
- But the numbers are not just numbers – said Hubbard – We use them to deal with the things we see, with the things we think.
- What do you mean? – asked one of the girls, Mandy.
- Well, to start, we must define what we are thinking about – answered Hubbard – Let me ask you a question: how many things you see around you?
The kids looked around, but they realised they couldn’t count just “everything”.
- You must tell us what you consider a “thing” – realised Constance – A t-shirt is a thing, but maybe the stripes in the t-shirts are things too.
Mervin added:
- Each blade of grass is a thing? Each piece of wood in the fence is a thing? But then, is the fence itself a thing? Is the lawn a thing?
- Even the empty space between two things could be a thing to count, if we decided – said Hubbard.
- So it’s impossible! – complained the kids.
- That’s why we must define what we are looking for, before we start working with numbers! – explained Hubbard – We must organize things in our head, according to sets!
- What do you mean? – asked Mandy.
- Let me tell you a story – said Hubbard.
The Story:
Mrs Flora has a lot of clothes, and she likes to organize them. Sometimes she wants to separate them by the type – shirts, shorts, skirts or blouses – sometimes she wants to separate them by colors, or by the graphic art in it.
She has trained some octopusses to separate the clothes for her. She tells one of them things like “pick all the blue clothes”, or “pick all the skirts”, or “pick all the ones with flowers in it”, and he separates the clothes as asked, and receives a little fish as reward.
She trained more than one octopus, so she can give them some rest – she is always organizing things, and don’t want to overload animals with too much work – but today her assistant, Donny, made a mistake. He brought all the octpusses to the bedroom at once.
She can’t take the octopus back to their pools without giving them a task and a reward, because they would be very upset. But if she gives orders and two of them try to pick the same piece of clothing, they will fight.
But there is a way out of it. Remember: each octopus will only pick clothes that are in the tables around him. So we must find a way to give orders to them in a way that don’t conflict with the orders of the others, and they don’t end up trying to pick the same clothing.
Help Mrs Flora: tell each octopus what kind of clothes he must look for in the tables adjacent to him, in a way that two of them never pick the same. Place the order in the octopus’ box and connect him with the correspondent clothes around him. One more thing: Mrs Flora don’t want any clothes left in the table after the octopusses do their picking.
Now go! Use your mouse to drag the order to the correspondent octopus and to draw the connections!