Math Trails

I was extremely happy with my presentation / workshop that I gave this afternoon at one of the elementary schools in town. I talked a bit about Math Trails and showed examples before giving the teachers about an hour to go through a sequence of steps towards the goal of having a math trail at their school. The enthusiasm from both the teachers and the principal was amazing. They were just bursting with ideas of how to implement these within their classes and with the whole school. The Principal even suggested having me come back to work with her a a subset of teachers as they worked on implementing some of the ideas in their school.

It is interesting to watch the teachers' faces. When I was introduced and it was clear that this was a "math talk." I could tell, immediately, who were the P.E., art, and music teachers. They had the looks that said, "yet another talk that doesn't pertain to me." But I think I even got them interested in the idea. That was fun, seeing them open up and share ideas about how math could be seen in their subject areas and having them contribute to the discussion.

For those of you that are wondering: A math trail is a series of math problems that are written assuming that the problem solver will be standing in a particular location. It may involve making actual measurements or just examining objects and locations carefully in order to answer mathematical questions. There are a bunch of examples on the internet. The larges repository that I've located so far is at the National Math Trail. Click on one of the two subtitles under National Math Trail map and you will find the math trails organized by state.

I'm really hoping that this school will do something with the problems that they created today and with the idea of having students create their own math trail to share with others.