We had a few slides to introduce MathHappens to the group and then dove right in to a hot topic, redistricting or Gerrymandering. We just had the proposed new Texas map released, but none of the negotiated changes that came the next day on the 14th, so there were real examples of all 4 types of Gerrymandering which are cracking,
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Plain Platonic Solids are pretty cool – fun shapes, interesting properties from side type: triangle square and pentagons; number of edges; number of faces and more. But they are also plain. Fall intern and UTeach Maker, Maddie Wallace took on the challenge to make some accessories that would create a way we can sort them, and match the objects to
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Thanks to the the Make: Education Forum for a great conference! From the Q&A: The slides I presented are available here. One book I really recommend, Ernest Irving Freese’s Geometric Transformations by Greg Frederickson. The book has had written plates by an architect that can be recreated in Corel or other graphics software. Some of the designs are great for
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Turns out you can use CorelDraw to reverse engineer the parts to a conic section model. The files are here, please help yourself. I cut ours out of 1/8″ wood so the slots are that size – you may need to adjust. If you want a model we may be able to send you one for free. Please fill out
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Interns Saurav Gandhi and Anh Nguyen co-presented the “Making and Math” session at the FAB16 Conference. They presented several of the math models we have constructed over the years including Koch Fractals, Mini Unit Circles, and Curve Stitching. Participants were shown how they can get creative with topics in Math by participating in making a Fractal Collage (see image gallery
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We’ve said it before and we said it again at the Connected Learning Summit in July. this was a great month of programs. You can see some of the keynote speakers as well as find our Ignite talk among some other excellent 5 minute presentations (2nd session, 2nd talk) in their post here. Highlights From the 2021 Connected Learning Summit
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This post is the sequence of instruction with work examples from a STEM Santa FE Camp held on January 28, 2021. The students are 7th and 8th graders enrolled in a summer program following a year of primarily on-line instruction. Lesson Plan History of Pooled Testing – Demo of Simple Pooling Order a Pooled Test Demo Kit (same as in
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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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MathHappens had the opportunity to present at the 2021 UTeach STEM Educators Conference. The theme for this year was Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in STEM Education. Paola and Josephine led our session on “Leveling the Playing Field: Creating Equity in Mathematics.” Below are some images of our slides. If you would like to view our entire presentation, here are our
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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
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