Let’s take
a trip to Manhattan to go to a math museum! When you first open the doors, you
see tons of children riding bikes and playing with magnets. What they don’t
realize is that all the exhibits are teaching you different math concepts. I feel
that if we turned classroom lessons more into these exhibits that children
would have more fun in the classroom and feel less stress everyday learning
math. They don’t see it as a boring lesson anymore, but rather a fun game that
everyone can play.
One of
the exhibits actually has riding a bike as an activity. These bikes are
specifically made to ride on the surface of this circular path. The wheels on
the bike are square shaped. Then the path itself was wavy and wrapped around a
single point to be forced into a circle. When the children would ride the
bikes, the points of the square fit perfectly into the grooves of the waves so
that the bike could move forward. However, if the children moved the bigger
bikes more toward the center of the circle, they wouldn’t be able to move. This
happened because the closer to the center, the closer together the waves
become. That way, the bigger square wheels will go over more than one wave at a
time and not fit. In its own way, the track is teaching the children shape
recognition without them even realizing it!
Then there
is the Human Tree exhibit which teaches kids multiplying and dividing. The
children step in front of a screen and their image shows up on it. Then when
they put up their arms, their arms turn into their body. So now there are three
of them on the screen. This goes on and on until there isn’t enough space on
the screen to fit any more. With a cute idea they place flowers on some of the “branches”
to make the image seem more like an actual tree. With this specific exhibit the
creators are trying to represent multiplication and division. Let’s say you started
out with an image of yourself and your two arms just became replications of
your body. So we wanted to find the multiple of two and three. So you would
start with your main body and draw two bodies off of that. So that gives you
the multiple of three that you are working with. Then you have to make sure
that each body has two bodies that represent where the arms would go, then you
stop adding on to it. Once you finished putting together the drawing on the
screen, you just add up how many bodies you have. You should get six, and you
can do this for multiple other problems as well.
The
museum doesn’t have set exhibits though. There are traveling shows that are
encased in the math museum itself as well. A funny face exhibit is one of these
traveling show’s exhibits. You sit in front of a camera that photographs your
face. Next the photo is stretched or scrunched to give off the image of a “fun-house
mirror”. There is actually and exact
formula using and X and Y coordinates that changes the pixels of the original
photo to create this new image.
This
museum uses coordinates, sines, cosines, vectors, hypotenuses, shape
recognition, as well as some physics attributes to help teach children in a fun
and unique way math skills that are needed in practically every school. It’s definitely
worth taking a look at the link at the top and possibly planning a trip to!
I would actually love to take my MAT107 classes there as a fieldtrip sometime in the future!
ReplyDelete