Sunday Funday means hands on activities at the Neill-Cochran House Museum in Austin, TX and MathHappens was the invited program on Sunday March 9, 2025. On special exhibit currently, but also part of the regular collection… Quilts!!. This museum invites visitors to “step into Austin History” and the quilt collection is a visitor favorite. Paul Cato, Communications Director at
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Wieland Elementary’s family night was a great opportunity to meet some kids and families and share some of our favorite optical illusions, and amusements. Tommi Linn brought hinged mirror books, markers and paper for free design. The Hexagon puzzle was a real joy for our littlest visitors. We let parents know about the Math Room open 9-3 on Saturdays and
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Greetings from the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering! On Saturday, March 1, 2025 MathHappens debuted in San Diego. We played non-stop with thousands of visitors at Petco Park from 10 AM to 5 PM! Check out these 5 scenes that we caught on camera. Scene 1: Photo Op! After a young boy made a hat out of Geometiles,
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The Impossible Cylinder is a new model we recently made in our workshop and added to our Math Rooms and exhibits. It has been well received by people of various ages, which we love and think makes for a fun addition to our spaces. The impossible cylinder illusion, also known as the Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion, works by tricking the brain
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We love a special event at MathHappens. We do several dozen per year through our local partnerships as well as with distant organizations. An example of an event type we do is running our usual math room programming on a special day. This year, we spent Presidents Day at The Works Museum in Bloomington, MN. Our math room there is
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MathHappens has been growing, and we now have locations in four states! We have partners, employees, and interns working in Texas, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Washington, but we still love being able to offer our remote internship experience to students in any state! This past fall and winter, I had the pleasure of working with Cole Parsons, an engineering student
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We were invited recently to a STEAM Fair in Minneapolis. It took place Saturday, January 25 and was sponsored by a local chapter of Jack and Jill of America, an organization dedicated to nurturing future African-American leaders by working with children and their mothers. We brought most of our usual favorites—such as butterfly puzzles, and Block by Block, Jr. (a
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Click through here for the whole presentation. We do three math “experiments” in the session all using “calling cards” other materials common in the books are corks, wine bottles, knives, candles and other handy household items from the 1890s. These are so much fun!
MathHappens intern Asa Grumdahl is interested in Heesch numbers. Unfortunately, a formal presentation of Heesch numbers and questions surrounding them is too complicated as a starting place to engage the general public. The question then was “How might we engage novices in this sophisticated bit of mathematics?” Step one was to name this activity we were designing. “The Surrounding Game”
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Bubble Tiles were inspired by a textile pattern in a book by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Find a link to his book on this info sheet. The idea is that a circle can be made of 6 60 degree arcs. Each arc can be inverted, or not and all the possible combinations make a tileset that has 13, or 14
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