Check out this beach towel! What do you wonder? What would you like to know?
Category: Math and Art
Patterns in the binomial expansion, Pascal
Realizing that (X+Y)n can be expanded with the help of Pascal’s Triangle offers some pretty and interesting math play. We love to bring a little fun and beauty into our math classes and the end results are neat! Here is…
Mother’s Day ideas (14 activities)
Updated! How much do we spend on Mother’s Day – Use the Mother’s Day event to engage your students in approximating, reasoning, and investigating as students estimate how much is spent in the United States for Mother’s Day. For what…
New bust of King Charles … in chocolate
Saturday, King Charles will be crowned as the King of the United Kingdom. Artists at the Mars Wrigley company made a gorgeous chocolate bust of the King wearing his military uniform. We wondered how much that big piece of chocolate cost to make.
Wheel of Theodorus
Bring a little art into your math class as you begin to use the Pythagorean theorem and your students first meet irrational numbers.
The HAT tessellation
An Einstein aperiodic tile has just been discovered. Find out what that means and why it is significant. Plus – play with the tiles. Do you want to tile your shower floor with these? Could a tile setter pull this off?
Time to make your prom clothes … with Duck Tape
Admire the possibilities of Duck Tape attire and calculate the cost of some of the outfits in time and tape.
Valentine’s Day (11 activities)
Have a heart Canstruction – Students use reasoning and approximation to analyze the number of cans of food contained in this one giant heart. Consider starting out the activity by showing students the picture of the heart and doing a see…
Chocolate heart-shaped raspberry cake
For Valentine’s Day, bake a cake. Students calculate base area or volume of cakes made from 2 cake pan sizes and observe how the volume of the cake changes with the increased pan size. This is an activity intended to…
The Times Square Ball
What does truncation mean? How is the Times Square Ball related to an icosahedron? Let students learn about the crystals and the LEDs that create this beautiful construction.
Beautiful mathematics
Color, measure, design, Sierpinski, spirals, Pythagorean triples, hexadecimal color codes, fractals, string design, modular math, Pascal’s triangle, Fibonacci, polyhedra, build an eclipse … Enjoy!
Before the holidays (16 activities)
We have tons (well, 16) of activities to bring to your class in this last week before the holiday break. Movies, science, art, cooking, economics, weather and the logic of calendars. Enjoy!
Thanksgiving, shopping, football and giving
How should I cook my turkey? – Students judge timing, cost, tastiness, and quantity necessary as they plan for the feast. 4.MD.1, 5.NBT.7, 4.MD2, 6.RP.3, 6.NS.3, 7.NS.3 Great video on a deep frying fire with William Shatner. Shopping season already! – Students will…
Little Amal
With refugees trying to survive hardships by traveling away from their homes, the story of Little Amal is powerful and touching. There is lots of math in creating an 11 foot tall puppet that can be controlled by 3 people and show fear, surprise, wonder, and generally the humanity of refugees. Bring the story of Amal to your classroom with this timely art.
Hexadecimal coloring
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…