Exploring Math

  The idea for this column came from a tweet by Tina Cardone.   The idea is to create an ongoing project filled with four elements designed to have students do one activity from each column each quarter.  At the end of the quarter, the students report back.

She basically created a choice board with choices to play by doing math art, math comics, or a puzzle,  research either a career, a mathematician, or find an article on math to read and summarize.  There is an explain section where the student explains a new math topic discovered in the last 100 years, or explains about an ancient math system, or an unsolved math problem.  The final section has the student try a math challenge problem, or problems from two other sources.

The play column is in there to show students that math can be fun and is not always answering problem after problem after problem.  So if you want to create your own, where would you go to find comics, art, or puzzles that students might enjoy.  You could borrow her version or you could personalize it to make it more relevant to your students.

Here are places that offer math comics that are actually rather funny.
1. Comic Math filled with samples and links to various mathematically based comics both popular and lesser known ones.
2. This list has comics based on topic.
3. This is a list of 7 places with great math comics.

Now for the art possibilities:
1. Math art for kids has some great ideas including creating a city scape out of the numbers of pi.  There are 21 different suggestions listed here.  Even though its for kids, I think some of my high school students would enjoy them so I think I'll try to find time to incorporate them into my class.

2. Smith Curriculum has some great art projects including the Pythagorean Snail based on the Pythagorean Theorem.  I should try this in my geometry class since some of the students are more artist than anything else and would rather draw than do school work.

3. To see works check out the Virtual Math Museum with some fantastic art based on mathematics.

This site is filled with mathematical puzzles that students might find interesting.

Check this site out as it lists both male and female mathematicians and their ethnicity.  Its quite a list.

My students are not ready for something like this but I like the idea of playing with mathematical art to add another layer to my classroom.  Let me know what you think.  I'd love to hear.