Math/art Project Reflection

For our first assignment, I actually had fun doing this project with my team! At first, it was a little difficult to have everyone agree on one specific idea on what shape to make because there are so many shapes that we can build with just binder clips! Our ideas are constantly changing as we weigh in on the pros and cons. We started building the stars with binder clips, since star shape alone has quite a few math structures that we can talk about with our class. However, we thought wouldn't it be more fun to expand on that idea by connecting the individual shapes together and to create a sphere?

I think this project would be great for secondary school students, particularly those in Gr 9 or Gr.10. It really helps them to be creative and build whatever shapes they want so the end result would be a 3-D sphere. Our team took many trials before deciding on the shapes that would be strong and durable to hold the structure together, so I can imagine the Gr.9 and Gr.10 students getting their hands dirty and exercise their brains on creating a strong and durable sphere made out of binder clips! It's all trial and errors. If a shape is too weak and unstable (not solid enough), they will have to take the shapes down and rebuild it.

As you can see, creating the desired structures with just binder clips need a lot of patience, effort and teamwork, which helps students with their communication skills. Communication, which I see in my team, was crucial because there were incidents when we weren't informed on what shapes to build and how to build it. Problem-solving is another area that can help students develop through this project. Students may ask “How can we build this shape so that a specific pattern follows to ensure durability?”, or “What are the ways (patterns) to link all the shapes together so that the sphere won't fall apart?” For math problems, students may wonder “How many different patterns do we see in a particular shape as this?”, or “How many clips do we need to invest so that all vertices are connected equally without having an extra vertex hanging unused (and all shapes are used accordingly)?” These are just some of the many questions that students may think with others.

In all, this project definitely helps Gr.9 and Gr.10 students to develop their sense of spatial visualization and spatial reasoning, as defined by the BCMT in high school level. Making connections and finding patterns to shapes is very important in this project because they need to know what 3-D shape to build upon, so the rest of the steps would be easy. It is also useful for students at Gr.9 and 10 levels because it can help them with their visualization between and among 3-D objects and 2-D shapes. If they find it difficult to visualize in 3-D, they can always draw 2-D shapes to get them started thinking (as many of our team members have done also). Doing so can help them visualize and interpret new ideas and helping each other. As well, because not all students can draw 3-D shapes on paper, so by using and manipulating concrete materials as binder clips, we hope that they can think abstractly and deeply about the process of building; possibly to reason with each other if certain steps make more sense than the other, if not try with different methods.