Elizabeth Lay, Claire Steffen and I had the opportunity to present a webinar through the Texas Historical Commission today. We discussed ways that museums can enhance visitor experiences with math, showed a variety of examples of math activities at museum locations and talked about our process in developing connected activities. Our Presentation Slides are here The Handout Recording Hosted by
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Genaille-Lucas Rulers are pretty cool. They are a clever calculator that you can use to multiply some pretty big numbers. MathHappens summer staff member Anh Nguyen made a colorful set from scratch in Corel Draw that you can download and print on a laser or inkjet printer. Feel free to copy, explore, and use. It’s a great project to try
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With the help of Jose Carrasco who coordinates Drive Thru Food Distributions in Schools by Austin Voices for Education and Youth the goodies will now include some supplies and math activities. What’s on the cart? 120 composition books with graph paper with math activity sheets, 60 sets of washable markers, and 120 mini games of SET. After our last conversation
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MathHappens Foundation is proud to have an opportunity to be a sponsor for the webinar series being offered by the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival. The educators at JRMF have done a great job adapting the festival format to zoom. Its really great! Sessions are offered in English and Spanish at times that can work for participants across the globe.
We are finding new ways to get math activities to our K-12 students and families in Austin. Today we are providing three models to families served by Jose Carrasco and the Dobie Family Resource Center in north Austin: A geometry activity set that can be used for young children learning shapes and for middle schoolers and even high school. It
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Check it out: Viyang Shah creator of this curved road for square wheels, also wrote up directions on how to play a Function Box Game. You can practice computation, work on understanding mathematical relationships and just have fun!
This Geometric Transformation shows how the sum of the first 6 Odd Squares is the square of 6, or 36. Its the classic “proof without words”. Freese’s Transformation also shows this relationship, but his “squares” all have sides sqrt 1, sqrt 3, sqrt 5, and so on. Freese Corel File, Adobe Illustrator File, Jpg printable
Here’s a fun one! Inspired by a conversation with Chris Daniels of Public Math. He said roll paper around a cylinder and cut on an angle to get an ellipse and produce a sine wave. So we did! And you can too. Then you can make a roller from ellipses, reflect your sine curve and roll the elliptical roller along
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This design is from a lost manuscript of Ernest Irving Freese found by Greg Frederickson and published in his 2018 book “Ernest Irving Freese’s Geometric Transformations: The Man, the Manuscript, the Magnificent Dissections” Frederickson mentions Freese’s manuscript in the bibliography of his 1997 book, “Dissections: Plane & Fancy, and included selections from it in a 5-part series of short chapters spread
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Ximena Garcia made a laser design for the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. You make two of each disk and glue them together for nice chunky pieces. We use dot stampers (for bingo sheets) to color the wood. Works great! The laser files are in this folder on our webpage. Tower of Hanoi is a model of exponential growth – number of
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