I woke up early this morning to take a trip to the Museum of Math in the city. It was my first time going there, and I have an assignment to complete literally a month from today that required me to go to this museum. I wanted to take my students there last year, and I'm glad that I wasn't able to. I think the museum is awesome, but many of the stations are very difficult to use and/or understand. On the top level, most of the mathematics behind the stations have much to do with Geometry. I have to create a lesson plan based one one of these stations that I visited. My friends and I below playing with some of the geometric shapes on 1F below:
The part of the museum that clicked with me the most were the tiles that stuck to the wall (I cannot recall the name of this part of the museum). I could easily picture some sort of lesson where students are learning about the first few square numbers, or an elementary level class learning about perimeter and area.
It is very hard to (immediately) see the math behind most stations. I think plenty of students would enjoy coming here, but won't necessarily come away with much new mathematical knowledge. I asked an employee about an average day at the museum. Apparently, 300 students come on average, and most tend to gravitate towards the following two activities:
Of course, the bike riding.. And..................................
Some sort of interesting maze game. Apparently they are adding a few new stations to the museum and improving the activities so they are more user friendly and so that they'll hopefully be easier to extract the mathematics from. I did pick up some dice for some of my students to learn their square facts!
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