Knitting, Math, and Classes

  A friend sent me a link for an article dealing with a college math class whose instructor taught math in a very nontraditional way.  In fact, she threw out the textbook, pencils, paper, and calculators.

Much of the math is being taught through the act of knitting while recording thoughts and answers via blog entries.

One question she posed to students involved two different pillows. One had the sides in this color order: red, yellow, green, blue, while the other has colors in this order: yellow, green, blue, and red.  If you rotate the first one 90 degrees counterclockwise.  The question is "How many ways could you put the pillows down on the bed to make it look different.  The answer is 24 but only 8 can be found by moving one pillow.  To figure out the answer, students followed instructions to create the pillows needed to physically complete the exercise and find the answer. 

Another topic is Rubber Sheet Geometry in which the idea is that all polygons, if they are made of a flexible material, are actually circles.   This shows up in knitting because when you knit a sock or gloves using double pointed knitting needles, you use three needles to create triangular shape yet when you are finished you have something that is actually circular.

On the other hand, if they knit an infinity scarf, this shows them an exception to the concept of creating a polygon out of a flexible enough material and the result is a perfect circle.   They see it when they've finished following the directions.

In addition, there is something going on at the North Branch of the Nashville Library system to help girls use knitting to become more interested in math and science.  The group meets once a week on Saturdays to knit something in response to a challenge. 

The first thing the program does is to teach students to knit.  Once they've learned the basics students are given a series of challenges to figure out on their own.  One example of this is to knit a square made up of concentric squares of alternating colors.  Another one is for them to create their own bag which requires them to use proportion and ratios.

The youngsters wear cameras around their neck to record how they solve the challenge.  The visual record is then analyzed by the people running the program.

Another thing that has been discovered is that knitting often illustrates three dimensional mathematical concepts in a way that is easily understood.  One professor stated that he'd over heard two college students discussing analytic geometry only to find out they were discussing how to knit an argyle sock.

That is a cool way to teach mathematics but at the moment, I don't think it will take off the way it might because many schools seem to believe that math still needs to be taught in the traditional ways.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.