Nature Nights are a series of family nights at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Admission is free and the center is open from 6-9pm. Families are invited to stroll the grounds, enjoy the courtyard activities and enjoy a taco or ice cream. And they can do some mathematical puzzles! Our take and make craft was a reversible flower. Lauren
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Our partners for the booth were Geometiles and its founder Yana Mohanty who brought an amazing Olympic ring Geometiles sculpture and Professor Jason Harron of Kennesaw State University who made Pythagorean Theorem models and also brought an undergraduate with her Galton Board model. Lauren Siegel and Jordan Varat came for MathHappens with a variety of models, Infinity gum and other
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Here’s a fun little toy. It’s useful for building an argument about the area of a circle. Let’s say you know that π (pi) is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Then, because the diameter is twice the radius, you know the circumference is 2π r. Usually this argument proceeds by drawing pictures. It turns
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MathHappens @ SXSW Edu was an opportunity to bring our approach to math enrichment to a world audience. We kicked off the booth with our senior team members: Matt Hertel, Lauren Siegel, Jordan Varat, Melissa Wilkinson and Christopher Danielson who came down to Austin from St. Paul, MN. It was a great way for us to spend some time together
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We love to be a part of free events! This is one of our favorites and Naila Williams, Stefany Espinoza and Taran Kumar had a great time. Every month admission is free at Texas’ flagship museum, and people line up before it even opens. For us it is a chance to engage with the museum, contribute to themed programming (Women
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On February 24th MathHappens’ four locations were open to the public in Autin, TX at the Nature and Science Center, and Millennium Youth Entertainment Complex, in Mankato, MN at the Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota and in Albuquerque, NM at Explora! Matt Hertel manages the space at the Nature and Science Center and Millennium and paused a moment to record
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We were invited, along with the Seattle Universal Math Museum (SUMM) to host a play space at NCTM’s Regional Conference in Seattle that took place earlier this month. The whole team organized materials, and then Matt Hertel and I met in Seattle ready to play math! Due to the nature of the space, and fire codes and whatnot, we had
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Does this method of curve stitching make a parabola, or just something that looks kind of parabola-ish? Geometrically, a parabola is the set of points in the plane that are equidistant from a point (the focus) and a line (the directrix). The parabola whose focus is the point (0,1), and whose directrix is y= -1 is algebraically defined as y=¼
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165 people of all ages were at the Buda Public Library on January 24 to celebrate Science, Technology, Art and Mathematics. We had something for everyone at our tables. Huston-Tillotson student and MathHappens intern Niela Williams did a great job facilitating and letting the community know about the free Math Room at ANSC. We found out that the librarians in
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Here’s the rap. Me: Can we do a little math together? You: Sure! Me: Here’s a triangle, right? You: Yes. Me: OK. You hold these pieces; I’m gonna swap these, and your job is to fill in the empty space to make the same triangle a different way. … Eventually (anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 minutes later) Us: Oh
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