Month:

How many tiles are there?

  • September 9

A high school student at Hockaday School created a campus STEM walk for elementary students to enjoy. In this walk stop, she comes up with a strategy for estimating the total number of tiles making up a walkway on campus.... CONTINUE READING

How many sections are there?

  • September 9

A high school student at Hockaday School created a campus STEM walk for elementary students to enjoy. In this walk stop, she looks at the beautifully statue of Hypatia, an ancient Egyptian mathematician and astronomer who died 415 AD. Here she notices the circle surrounding the sections and asks us to do some math to figure out the number of sections within this circle.... CONTINUE READING

What is the golden ratio?

  • September 9

A high school student at Hockaday School created a campus STEM walk for elementary students to enjoy. In this walk stop she explores the golden ratio that she sees in the dance studio on campus.... CONTINUE READING

How tall is the sculpture?

  • September 9

A high school student at Hockaday School created a campus STEM walk for elementary students to enjoy. In this walk stop, she stops at a tall sculpture that contains glass shapes created by Hockaday students and invites us to estimate the height of the sculpture and also to estimate the total number of glass shapes on the sculpture using some math detective work!... CONTINUE READING

Why is the bollard this shape?

  • September 9

A high school student at Hockaday School created a campus STEM walk for elementary students to enjoy. In this walk stop, she wonders why the traffic bollard is the shape it is.... CONTINUE READING

What is the slope?

  • September 9

A high school student at Hockaday School created a campus STEM walk for elementary students to enjoy. In this walk stop, she invites us to consider the slope of the outdoor amphitheater on the campus.... CONTINUE READING

What is Intuitive Wayfinding?

  • September 9

Airports can be bustling places, filled with thousands of people all trying to get to where they need to go all at once. Interior designers can help direct this flow by emphasizing intuitive wayfinding in their work – subtle clues and markers incorporated in a space's design that make navigation easier to naturally understand. In Love Field, this involves patterns in the tiles and ceilings that help guide travelers to where they need to go. This video was supported by the City of Dallas Office... CONTINUE READING

How High Does it Climb?

  • September 9

The sculpture Venture, by Alexander Liberman, is composed of several steel tubes, stacked toward the sky. At such a great height, measuring its size by hand can be a challenge; instead visual estimation must be used. Additionally, the shapes comprising Venture are discussed, involving various ellipses and special forms that can even be recreated at home! This video was supported by the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs. Supplementary Activity Guides for this video to extend student learn... CONTINUE READING

How does geometry relate to the Campanile Windows?

  • September 9

The stained glass of Campanile Window, by Octavio Medellin, contains irregular quadrilaterals – four-sided shapes with sides of different lengths – interspersed with lines and triangles in varying angles. In combination, all these lines create a sort of linear perspective, mimicking the way images shrink and converge as they recede from a viewer. Despite being made of flat, static glass, those design elements give the piece a clever way to convey a sense of energy and motion that matches wel... CONTINUE READING

What Mathematical Differences Do We See?

  • September 9

The four individual works that make up Campanile Window have a similar-looking structure to each other, but are not identical. Methods of quantifying some of their differences mathematically are discussed, analyzing color, lines, and interior shapes. This video was supported by the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs. Supplementary Activity Guides for this video to extend student learning for K-12 grade levels are freely available here:... CONTINUE READING