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
…
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″
…
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
…
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
…
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
…
The Buda Public Library is located right in City Hall MathHappens Foundation sponsored math kits to take home and keep as well as, and we also developed 5 themed kits to check out and return which will all debut at the Math All Around Us event. Professor Jennifer Austin from University of Texas is going to present live and answer
…
How can educator forge better relationships with their community? This is a great example of reaching out to the community, providing useful information and showing how some calculations can be important in our day to day life. In fall 2017 Amy Gross decorated a table, created a display of information, shared her hydration tracking system and samples of fruit infused
…
This is a fantastic way to layout this problem posted on twitter by Olivier Longuet and pointed out to me by Ralph Pantozzi. The drawing progression is on the right or you can etch the left (blank) onto wood, and add the finished pieces as you figure it out. Our files are here if you want a jpg, svg, Corel
…
Here are two fun puzzles you can find in this classic book. The files to make them are right here! (secret: The wood is colored with Bingo stampers) Moscow Flower and Crayfish, Laser cut file types: Corel 2020, Adobe Illustrated, SVG, JPG
We were happy to have a submission to the NY Times accepted for publication. We wrote some directions for making a Sonobe cube and if you make 27, you can make the parts of a Soma made some graphics files, but the editorial team makes it all look beautiful. Also the photographer is pretty amazing! We also had a nice
…