Quan Vuong and Samantha Trevino have been sharing some navigation innovations that allowed La Salle and other Explorers to cross to the new world with Bullock visitors on Tuesdays from 12 -3. Today they are talking about Mercator Maps, the distortion that occurs when you project to a flat surface and also how the ships navigators used the sighting of
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Josephine Sheng, Paola Garcia and Cassandra Gonzalez at Science Day Tessellation puzzles are a great way to spend some time with some regular and irregular polygons and as a group make some beautiful puzzles. These are going to stay at Gilbert Elementary in the library. And we got a nice note from the principal: Thank you so much for sending
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We were invited to bring some Math to Killeen Texas on Saturday March 9th and we brought a lot! See the Program guide Michelle made. You can also follow links in the guide to some quickie videos that explain the math activities and models we took with us to Killeen. MathHappens staff for this event included Quan Vuong, Alex Li,
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We had a great time at the Thinkery’s Community Spotlight: Women in STEAM. Thanks to Halle Herzog, Kyla Kalugden and Cassandra Gonzalez. We featured the irregular pentagon tilings and artistic butterfly stylings of Marjorie Rice. Marjorie Rice found 4 of the remaining 6 types that were still unidentified in 1975. For this activity we looked at a number of shapes
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I really enjoyed the opportunity to guest lecture at Megan Raby’s Perspectives class this week. The class is all about relating history to math and science. Michelle Tat came with and we ran through the Navigation Field trip activities we created for the La Belle Exhibit at the Texas State History Museum. Alex Li also came to assist the afternoon
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What a great way to start the new year! Mengyu Chen, a recent graduate of Vassar College signed on for our Parker Dewey Internship in December and I’m so glad she did. She did the intern reading, and spent some time with some calipers and other models. Then she visited at least two museums. She combined her knowledge of
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We had a wonderful, productive Fall 2018 here at MathHappens and we celebrated the end in style! We went to Whole Foods to eat and ice skate! Present were Michelle, Ben, Paola, Josephine, Halle, Rusheel, Abdulkarim, and Lauren. Some big achievements from this fall were: Participating in Austin Museum Day with activities at FIVE different museum locations Going to the
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Very excited to participate in this conference. Lauren, Abdul, Paola and Ben all attended and also led sessions and learned a lot about this new format. Discussion based, the sessions are facilitated rather than led. Project based learning, maker spaces, equity and math were all on the topic lists. Teachers were really interested in the Napier’s Bones models we
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Using an arts and crafts approach, we can teach a classic mathematics technique with low stress. We are providing the demonstration kit, a magnetic starter triangle and a simple straight edge (also magnetic) in sets of five as a door prize at this weekend’s Edcamp at Region 13, an UnConference for educators. We hope that the educators who win the kits
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Exhibiting a Globular Map, an “Innovative” Mercator Map (1500s) and a Modern Map to show the way maps changed over time for purposes of navigation. The Globe shows us the true proportions of the continents, and the 3d printed Stereographic shell shows how translating a sphere to a flat surface can cause the kinds of distortions the Mercator map. Ben,
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