This summer the fractal fun just won’t stop! We met Mychal Threets, the Children’s Librarian at the Solano County Library’s Springstowne Branch, when he visited our booth at the Bay Area Makersfaire. Mychal sometimes uses coloring sheets as a fun way to extend the time families spend in the library after his popular StoryTime. He told us he wanted to give
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Kids were surprised that they can learn about math and space! We used golden ratio calipers to find that proportion in a satellite photo of Hurricane Sandy and a space photo of Spiral Galaxy NGC1232. Participants made a Golden spiral necklace.
If you ever wondered if families, adults, kids, teens would be interested in some math on a Saturday, this should answer your question. We brought Tessellations, and in particular some designed with Marjorie Rice’s discoveries and we also featured Lewis Carroll’s puzzles, tangrams and cipher codes. MH team: Kyla Kalugdan, Josephine Sheng and Lauren Siegel, and special thanks to our
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Michelle, Paola and Kyla headed out to the Buda Public Library Spring Fling April 14 to measure a special tree. Consensus says its 13 feet tall. Participants learned to use a quadrant and landscape measuring tape to set up their calculation. They also made plumb line necklaces. Thanks to the City of Buda and youth librarian Caitlin Foley!
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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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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MathHappens was happy to be back at the Harry Ransom Center for Austin Museum Day. Activities for the day were based on the Ransom Center’s Lewis Carroll collection. Our math activities included making your own secretly coded name tag using a cipher key based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. We had tangrams which could be rearranged to look like the
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We had a great time at Maker Pfest this past Saturday! The Pflugerville Public Library is a beautiful community space and we were pleased to see so many excited visitors at Maker Pfest. Abdulkarim and Arami, both part of the UTeach Maker program, staffed the event. Abdulkarim talked to visitors about the golden ratio calipers and how this ratio shows
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We spent a wonderful afternoon in the math activities area of the Alice in Wonderland Exhibit. We supplemented the activities in place with an iPad demo of the Alphabet Cipher, called ABCipher courtesy of “Blue from Tricochet[.com]”, a talented Austin area coder who created ABCipher and put it in iTunes specifically for this exhibit. Visitors could choose a codeword from
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