Math Art – Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)

Fun with Paper and Scissors and Tape

We started off this meeting with a brainstorm of what you can do with paper. Check out our Jamboard to see all the varied and creative ideas we came up with.

I then led the group through an exploration that involved cutting, taping, noticing, wondering, making a prediction, and then more cutting. Here is a link to the slides. You can follow the pictures to do the exploration yourself.

Celtic Knots at COABE 2023!

Mark and I led a hybrid in-person/virtual presentation at the COABE conference in Atlanta, GA at the beginning of April. Since then, new people have joined our mailing list and a recent meeting on April 18th. We’re happy to have you as new members.

You can watch the recording of the meeting below. The padlet mentioned in the meeting (with links to Celtic knots and related tools) is here: https://bit.ly/CAMICOABE2023. Enjoy!

Music and Polypad

We started this meeting with a warm-up question: What is something you are good at that you could teach someone else? It turned out we were a very talented group with skills ranging from kayaking to mountain climbing and from making enchiladas to reading and writing Egyptian hieroglyphs.

We took some time on our own to explore some demonstrations of the new music and sound features of Mathigon Polypad. (To learn more, go to Using Polypad: Music – Mathigon.)

Ring-a-Ding Numeration

We started this meeting with a notice and wonder with this image of the numbers 1 through 6 in a numeration system created by professor emeritus at Smith College Jim Henle. The system (a piece of mathematical art!) is called Ring-a-Ding Numeration. The rings are the circles and the dings are the dots.

Number Visuals

The session opened with a wonder and notice of this image:

Participants noticed that the number of dots in each figure is increasing by one as you look left to right in each row. One person said they see certain groupings of dots repeated in other groupings. Another noticed that the dots are arranged in a circle for some numbers and someone else wondered if that was because those numbers are prime.

Math Art Challenges

Annie Perkins is a middle school/high school math teacher in Minneapolis, MN and she has been sharing a daily math art challenge every day since the governor’s made the call for everyone to stay at home. As I write this, we are going on Day 19.