The first session of The Math Club met on Monday, March 10, with about fifteen children and adult participants. I am happy about reaching my goals for the first meeting, namely: participants learning a little bit about each other and starting to form a working community; an introduction to several sizable math topics; and spending three hours in a joyful and satisfying atmosphere. I will give a brief recap of the activities.

The next meeting is on Monday, March 24th. The club is for children ages 9 to 14 and their adults. I got to say we adults probably had at least as much fun as the kids at the first meeting. We got a pretty good balance of boys and girls, and they seem to work well together.

"Special Snowflake" activity. We started the day by making Kirigami ornaments featuring each person's name. The idea belongs to a CHS member, Chrissy Akers, who taught me how to do that. (Update: you can discuss the activity's description by Chrissy and the software we are developing in this forum thread. It is easy to keep folding paper in two to produce two, four, eight etc. layers (the powers of two). We mostly did "the snowflake fold" that produces six layers, with three lines of symmetry, and it's moderately tricky to fold. Next time we do Kirigami, the plan is to venture into harder folds, say, with five or seven lines of symmetry. Here is a bit of online snowflake software in case people want to play at home.

We then went outside, since it was a nice sunny day, and played "Human Knots." The rules are simple: a bunch of people stick out their right hands and then each hand holds one other hand. Repeat for left hands. Try to untangle the resulting human knot. Interesting math ideas that come up are orientation and knot equivalence. A simpler math idea is the fact that you need an even number of people to play. People also get to learn each other's names, because they have to give directions, and in general are brought closer to each other, physically and metaphorically. Here is a site with a few more fun knot activities - some with people as well, and some solo with paper, rope and scissors.


picture by paaging53

After vigorous exercise of Human Knots, we went to have a brunch and to talk about group's interests. These included art in general and surrealism in particular, writing, computers, food, life sciences, anime, cats and many more wondrous things. Children made a colorful chart out of pictures of their interests, and their names. The goal was to help us plan for future activities of The Club, and also to help participants see who shares their interests.

For another quieter, sit-down activity after eating we had "Definition Wars." It is a "debate" activity about making your own definitions and trying to deconstruct other people's definitions. A description can be found here: http://www.naturalmath.com/index.php?option=com_jd-wp&Itemid=88888917&p=24 It is very hard to define everyday objects, like "chair" we worked on. "Something with four legs you sit on" - but you can sit on a table, and also some chairs have three legs, or one, or none. Does a chair need a back rest? What materials can be used? However do people manage to write dictionaries? Interestingly, defining most math objects is much easier than that. For the next time we do the activity, I plan on some geometry definitions.

Finally, we played two related "broken communication" games. The social significance of both is to highlight different communication venues and what can go wrong with them. The mathematical and learning significance is to bring attention to exactness and details of your expression. "Shape Telephone" is a game where one person draws a picture and another person re-creates it from verbal instructions only: the game equivalent of describing a map or a design by phone. The two players stand back-to-back and can't see the original picture or the progress of the introduction. The game brings out a lot of spatial vocabulary as people describe direction, size and relative position of elements of their pictures. It also takes attention and a pretty high level of listening, understanding and cooperation within the pair. "Word Telephone" is a game where people form a circle and pass around a word, in whispers. Usually the word gets garbled after passing through the whole circle, which is, among other things, a great model of how gossip works. After the full circle is complete, everybody says what they thought they heard out loud, and much laughing occurs as people trace curious word transformations.



The reason I like to introduce "broken communication" games, beside them being fun and educational (especially the "Shape Telephone", is that they help people feel better about "not getting" the meaning of some math concept or another right away. The point these games drive across is that it's EASY to lose the meaning in communication, and that you need repetition and multiple senses (not just words, or just symbols) to understand something well and to make sure it does not get distorted, like words of pictures typically get distorted in these games. There is a myth that it is possible to "get" math instantly and if you don't, something is wrong with you. If people experience math anxiety of that sort, I refer to the games to assure them that they just need more communication about math than they were getting, and maybe in different forms (say, pictures in addition to words).