Welcome to our inaugural Take and Make! With these posts, you will be able to access links with templates for some of our activities. You are invited to Take the idea and Make it your own. The examples shown below were made using 1/8″ baltic birch plywood, but you can also have fun making them out of paper or cardboard!
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To build on the exhibit already in place at the Austin Nature and Science Center, visitors were able to stop by our table and make their own golden ratio calipers. Alongside this activity, guests were given the opportunity to color in their own golden ratio spiral, which could then be made into a necklace. This ratio (1: 1.618…) is present
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Visitors learn about the Fibonacci Sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…) and how it relates to bee genetics. The visitors center has an actual beehive in the entryway. Visitors could color in their own bee. The bee family tree is etched on the back.
Thursday June 13, 2019. Enthusiasm for these fractal parts is amazing. Something about the stages of the Koch Fractal inspires interest, excites the mind and inspires creativity.
Ben Duong presenting Curve Stitching! Straight lines make parabolas and conics! Favorite Quote: “I have to buy this! All three of my grandkids are totally quiet.”
Paola headed to Nature Nights to present math connections to Bee Genetics. Drones have one parent: a Queen, and Queens have two: a Drone and a Queen. When we make the family tree….SURPRISE! Fibonacci Numbers! Participants made their own Bee, tessellated butterflies and used the model to see how the bee genetics relates to Fibonacci’s rabbit problem.
What ages? All We brought 50 lbs of wood math activities to MakerFaire Bay Area and we brought home about 3lbs of unused materials. We really enjoyed the enthusiasm! Many thanks to UTeach Austin Makers Mao Leonard and Ben Duong and CalTeach Student Celeste Gonzalez as well as Berkeley Grad and MH Boardmember Alex Siegel.
This group surprised us! These 5th graders worked on a voronoi map, observed voronoi patterns in a microscope and on animals and participated in a lively discussion on cholera and epidemiology. When we got to the iPad demo of circles colliding one young man watching the patterns emerge from colliding circles said “this is so satisfying”. With overcast skies, we
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What are tessellations? A repeating pattern of shapes that goes on forever without any gaps or overlaps. You can think of tiling a floor. Squares, triangles and hexagons are all shapes that tessellate. Mathematician Marjorie Rice discovered some very interesting polygons that tile. It is fun to color and move around all kinds of geometric shapes! See how these squares
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Mike Bailey of the Brazoria County Historical Museum provided us this photo. He is using our model Gunner’s Quadrant with a cannon there at the Museum. We based our model on the one seen above in an article on Nicholas Tartaglia, the inventor of ballistics. https://www.famousscientists.org/niccolo-tartaglia/