On New Year’s Eve, the iconic Times Square ball will descend to mark the start of year 2020. The ball isn’t really a ball. It is a geodesic icosahedron. What does that mean and how do you transform an icosahedron into this ball?
Point of view – With any set of cubes, enjoy building this creation using our two view-point pictures. How many blocks are in my stack? What is the least number of blocks that I used? The most number of blocks that I used?…
If you have a set of cubes for your classroom, this would make a great group hands-on project. Its an old puzzle but the activity deserves a revisit. Below are two straight-on images of my stack of blocks. Can you…
Flag of the United States from 1777 to 1795. In honor of Independence Day we thought it would be fun to look at one story about the first American Flag. The rough design of the flag was drawn by a…
Act One: Check out this beach towel! What do you wonder? What would you like to know? Miami artist, Misael Soto (pictured on the left below), created this giant art project to make a statement about people sharing territory at the beach.…
Can you see the many spirals in this design? Students calculate the size of each increasing round of squares and consider what sort of spirals these must be. The activity: SpiralingSquares.pdf Working with a little mathematical art is a great…
Mother’s Day by the numbers – Mother’s Day is right around the corner and this means big business for the greeting card and floral industries. Let your students practice averages, percents, and large numbers while they analyze the statistics on Mother’s…
Pythagorean triples are not only handy for students to recognize but produce some interesting and lovely patterns. We’ve combined a little coloring with our Pythagorean Triple pattern investigation to let your students relax while they color, view the beauty, and…
Parametric graphing, heart area, chocolate volume, making a heart-shaped cake, pie charts of holiday candy sales, how many cans in a can heart canstruction, where do all of those flowers come from, best deal on bagged candies, making a cardioid … Valentine everything!
Share the data in your class and ask what the numbers make your students wonder and what they can observe from the information. Happy New Year!
Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007) was a an American artist involved in Conceptual art and Minimalism. This structure is housed in the garden of the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall. The activity: Four-sidedPyramid.pdf CCSS: 4.OA.C, 5.OA.B, 7.EE.B, HSF.BF, HSF.LE, HSM, MP5 Two related…
Let your students simply enjoy coloring our designs or artistically play with the whole creation of Φ designs. Simply coloring our Fibonacci patterns might allow students to ponder the Fibonacci sequence (while they learn more about its beauty) and just…
Bring a little art into your math class as you begin to use the Pythagorean theorem and your students first meet irrational numbers.
Probably most of us have heard of and even used hexadecimal color codes. Don’t you wonder why their number descriptions really make sense? In this activity we first ask students to color in our Golden Spiral by giving them the…
