On site in Austin to celebrate on Feb 18: Teacher Julie Wu, MH Admin Melissa Wilkinson and Lauren Siegel; UT and UTeach students Ella Basken, Matt Hertel, Laura Choi and Quan Nguyen; Stefany Espinoza and Marianne Villanueva. Matt has managed the room since June 2022. Putting a math room in a public place of play, learning and nature is a
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This list is both incomplete and growing, but we’ll continue to add and share. We are interested in helping any organization interested in sponsoring programs, installations and events that bring mathematics to the public conversation, increase access to learning and provide more pathways to positive engagement and success in mathematics and STEM. This is a busy table runner! And it represents
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We are located inside the visitors center at the Austin Nature and Science Center at 2389 Stratford Drive. Admission is free every Saturday from 9 am – 3pm and Sunday from noon – 3pm Come by and take a look, or check out the 2022 Summer Summary here. Some items may change from week to week! More great photos from July
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What a nice event at the George Morales Dove Springs Recreation Center! In partnership with the Austin Public Library we set up some stacking frames for ball pit balls, giant tangrams, provided a flower of life medallion to color, chompers (mathematical origami) and geometry kits to make your own flower of life. Many thanks to Austin Public Library and our
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We’ve been working closely with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in creating activities and models to accompany the Beehive they have on site. There are a lot a mathematical concepts that can be taught in relation to the way beehives are constructed such as tessellations, Voronoi diagrams, area, and perimeter. We can’t wait to see how they use these activities and
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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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Nina Hunt, Elizabeth Wrightsman, and Josephine Sheng helped present one of our new activities at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s Winter Tree Fest this past Saturday. Visitors had the opportunity to explore Pull-String 3D shapes (laser files are here). Here is a video of one of the shapes that visitors got to make to go with the Fortlandia exhibit that was at
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One person can make a real difference by bringing math into a family event at the Nature Center. Emmie Chng was working solo with an enthusiastic gathering of families. They learned how to make a plumbline, how to use a quadrant, how to make one at home and why we look to the north star to find latitude. Here’s the
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The idea for MathHappens to work with tessellating pentagons originated from intern Jason Gorst’s suggestions for future projects on his final report. A tessellation describes an arrangement of shapes that tiles a plane with no gaps or overlaps.The challenge of finding all possible tessellating pentagons was issued in 1900 by David Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris
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We had an amazing time at Austin Nature and Science Center! Photo Gallery to come! At ANSC, we shared with the public ways to understand math through art. We brought out our tessellating pentagons and regular shapes (squares, rectangles, etc.) and invited the public to go through the history that brought us to the 15 irregular tessellating pentagons that we
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