It has been several days since I came back from the incredible Atlanta Science Festival, and I am still savoring the experience. The magnitude of the event is best conveyed by this graphic: I had the honor of being part of the booth hosted by Mathhappens Foundation, which has been “putting the M in STEM…
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This past Valentine’s Day I decided to build a Geometiles version of Robert Indiana’s iconic Love sculpture. I wanted to build it in an urban setting as a sort of pop-up public art installation. I think I was partially inspired by Denver’s Blue Bear as an example of a piece of public art that was…
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Among the myriad math lessons offered to us by the Olympic Games, here’s one involving just the rings. I recently challenged myself to model the rings using Geometiles, and came up with what you see against the background of the UCSD Track and Field Stadium. When Susan Lopez of LopezLandLearners saw this picture, she realized that it would make a great estimation problem: How many triangles and squares does it take to make one of these rings, just by looking at it? What a great way to start children thinking about estimates….
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What a great exercise it would be for a child to figure out how to “model” this wall with only equilateral triangles and squares. This is exactly the kind of thinking that the writers of the Common Core Math standards illustrate in the draft of their Geometry Progression for Grades K-6, pp. 7, 11-12. Geometiles™ were used for the modeling task, as shown above….
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