Artistic way to encourage understanding of a conic section. Participants physically build an ellipse by choosing two foci and sketching the figure through a loop of string. While stitching an elliptical string design they puzzle about varying the foci spread and the loop length to create more extreme ellipses and are intuitively introduced to the measurement of eccentricity.
I have two fish in my aquarium. Betty is my white goldfish. She often stays really close to the front wall as she swims towards her food. Stripe, my clownfish, usually swims diagonally across the tank to the back top…
3 activities about wrapping presents: On the diagonal, 3-act by estimation with iPhone, and judging sizes and needs by estimation with man and shopping basket.
Fall is a beautiful time of year for hiking. Many students will be walking in the woods and mountains to enjoy the colorful leaves and the cool weather outside. Let them combine what they are doing with their families and…
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…
Just announced! Ben Watson is coming back to the Patriots!Ben Watson played for the Patriots at the beginning of his career. Then he joined the Cleveland Browns, the New Orleans Saints, and the Baltimore Ravens. Now he’s coming back to…
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…
In this activity students determine if this method for minimizing wrapping paper is actually more efficient then the traditional method. For a hands on learning experiment, have students actually wrap a small rectangular prism using any available paper in both the traditional and diagonal methods. Then let them compare the two quantities of wrapping paper and decide which method uses less paper and by what percent.
The Niña Columbus Day is a bit of an enigma that used to be celebrated throughout all of the Americas. Indigenous people were not treated well by the European colonization that began with Columbus’s voyage. For that reason, many U.S.states…
Bring a little art into your math class as you begin to use the Pythagorean theorem and your students first meet irrational numbers.
Let students explore the patterns of perfect squares and Pythagorean Triples as they analyze our piece of art and decide why the resulting construction looks like spiraling squares. For a finale they color their own spiraling triple. The activity: SpiralingTriples-activity.pdf
How were your holidays? Your school vacation? Mine was good. I surprised my family with this HDTV, which I wrapped and hung on our wall. The size of an HDTV is determined by the length of its diagonal. What size…
Brian can’t even go to his town’s spring festival without seeing math. Let your class approximate the height or length of this ladder by using the relative size of the cars or the people to approximate the ladder’s length.
Use this activity to help your students discover the Pythagorean theorem. Pythagorean theorem work is often skill and drill work with contrived right triangle problems. In this activity students work with a visual representation of the Pythagorean theorem in order…
