Every time the weather gets turns favorable, I get inspired to grab some sidewalk chalk and do #sidewalkmath. It’s been a thing for me the last couple of years. It’s a great way to promote public displays of math (which we never see), get the general public thinking about math (which rarely happens informally), and work in some creativity in the process. I’ve been messing around with #sidewalkmath in the neighborhood where I live (here and here), and I’ve also had students take part the last couple of years.
With this in mind, last week I took the kiddos out to let them publicly showcase their mathematical prowess via the sidewalk. They were graphing trigonometric functions and the sidewalk was primed and ready to go. I numbered each slab in front of our school, paired them up, and gave them a trig function. I let them go. After they graphed their own equation, they had write the equation for another graph on the sidewalk.
I read somewhere that our school is located in the poorest congressional district in the U.S. While the kids and I were out in front of our school sketching the functions, it hit me that the overwhelming majority of the people that walked by our math probably had clue what they were looking at. That’s disappointing for sure, but precisely why doing it was so important.
bp