We took a “Maker” approach at STEM SantaFe’s camp this week. Students experimented with different ways to make a moveable joint using a variety of materials: balloon pieces, tin foil, brads, rubber band and even the wax paper bag the materials came in. Creative ideas included bending the brads to make tension, combining brads with balloons. We also made 3
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We’ve been working closely with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in creating activities and models to accompany the Beehive they have on site. There are a lot a mathematical concepts that can be taught in relation to the way beehives are constructed such as tessellations, Voronoi diagrams, area, and perimeter. We can’t wait to see how they use these activities and
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MathHappens had the opportunity to present at the 2021 UTeach STEM Educators Conference. The theme for this year was Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in STEM Education. Paola and Josephine led our session on “Leveling the Playing Field: Creating Equity in Mathematics.” Below are some images of our slides. If you would like to view our entire presentation, here are our
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MoMath has posted the Rosenthal Prize Lessons! Check out ours called Building a Tool to Deepen Understanding here. It has lots of great photos. We are very excited to present this activity as part of our presentation at Connected Learning Summit. It has potential for a lot of great Maker elements. You can start from scratch with two dots 2″
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We need more math where people can find it, play with it, and enjoy it. Therefore, are excited to introduce our newest project: MathHappens in the Newspaper. Elizabeth Wrightsman is heading this project and the rest of the team is contributing ideas, submissions, and landing pages for each week. Below you’ll find an up to date display of all our
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After talking with Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, we began searching for new ideas to interact with Voronoi Diagrams. During our pre-pandemic presentations and events we allowed people to interact with a Voronoi simulation that had been posted on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voronoi_growth_euclidean.gif While brainstorming we decided to buy a flipbook kit and test out what we could do with them. One of our
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We were inspired by a post on Twitter by Olivier Longuet shown below. The object in the photo is an icosahedron, a 20-sided 3D shape, made out of three golden rectangles with side lengths that obey the golden ratio (1:1.618033…). To make a cardboard version of the icosahedron, print out this document and follow the instructions! You can also make
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This is a great example where mathematicians applied some creative thinking to solve a very real world problem. It is Abraham Wald’s Survivorship Bias problem. To help explain the sequence of concepts that lead to his insight, we made some wooden planes to help visualize the problem, and the solution. We start out thinking about the planes that come back
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THE PARABLE OF THE LIFE PRESERVER EXPERIMENT by Phil Siegel There once was a Navy in a country we all know. One of its Admirals had a brilliant idea. If one life preserver works well and saves lives maybe two will work better. So they ran an experiment by throwing sailors into the water and tossing them two life preservers…one
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MathHappens Foundation and STEM Santa Fe partnered together to host a week’s worth of camp sessions for a group of 27 students from March 15-19. Camp sessions were led by MathHappens staff, Lauren Siegel, Josephine Sheng, Elizabeth Wrightsman, Anh Nguyen and Viyang Shah and group discussions were led by a group of facilitators including Naila Hajiyeva, and Quan Nguyen who
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