Maths But Not Maths

Outdoor Learning Environment

Maths But Not Maths is a Creative Partnerships Change Project. The change we are making is to invent creative new methods for teaching Maths at Hounsdown School in Southampton.

The brief was to work with students and staff at Hounsdown to create a 'Maths Garden' - an outdoor space/structure for maths lessons, my idea is to create a raised outdoor concrete platform, kind of a low stage, set into the concrete platform would be a grid of Keyclamp ground sockets set at 500mm centres, this grid of sockets will allow the pupils at the school to engage creatively with maths by constructing large 3D mathematical shapes using lengths of tube and cord. The concrete platform is 5m x 5m x 0.4m, the surface will be polished concrete and the grid will be demarcated using a special concrete dye.

School Workshops

22nd & 23rd March - Spaghetti & Marshmallow construction challenge.

The 1st workshop was designed to be a fun way of changing students perceptions of what a maths class could be.

The challenge for the Year 7 & 8 students was planned by Will Nash with the Core Group, we decided that each group would get a specific number of Marshmallows, 10 large and 20 small, and 250g of dry spaghetti. The Spaghetti is used as the struts and the Marshmallows are used to link the struts. The structures are lightweight and surprisingly strong if they are built using sensible design principles.

17th & 18th May - Geodesic Domes – outdoors.

The 2nd workshop was expected to be more challenging, it turned out to be very difficult. Like real engineer’s, they needed to rely on teamwork to get this project finished. Why? Because the dome tends to flop over unless it’s supported, and fixing the struts together is a bit tricky unless you get help holding all the newspaper tubes together.

Geodesic domes are made of interlocking geometric shapes - often triangles. Because loads are spread over many triangles, these domes are especially strong structures. Often made of aluminium bars and plexiglass, they’re very light compared to ordinary structures.

Only one dome was finished in time, all the others collapsed.

7th & 8th June - Paper Cup Spherical Dodecahedrons

This workshop was my response to the struggles we had in the previous Dome building workshop, the task had to be more simple in order for us to be able to complete it in the short time available. The workshops are only one hour long?

I remembered a project one of the performing arts students at the University of Brighton had been working on a few years back, it involved making a sphere from vacuum formed bucket shapes, this and some Google research, led to the paper cup dodecahedrons.

On day one we tried it out with the core group, we built four spheres in a short time, they all ended up being distorted, almost organic looking, which led to discussions about maths in cellular stuctures, ideas which lead to chaos theory - Each additional cup being attached in a very slightly different way leads to different final configurations.

The core group decided to split the classes into groups of 4, each group would make their own sphere.

We worked out a method for creating small clusters of 7 cups, the cups being stapled in a hexagonal arrangement with one cup in the centre and 6 cups around the outside. These clusters were then joined together to form the sphere, I think each sphere needed about 250 cups.

All 5000 cups were used.

The completed spheres were hung up in the main hall.

21st & 22nd June

Hazel Structures

The objective of these workshops was to experiment with possibilities of form offered by the materials available from the woodland next to the school.

I spent the first day collecting materials and trying out ideas with members of the Core Group. We came up with a selection of ideas and fixing methods for hanging mobiles and free-standing towers, and collected hundreds of Hazel poles which are ideal for mathematical shape because they are straight and very flexible.

We also repaired Mr Jones’s Office Seating and created a handy woodland daybed for anyone who needed a snooze

On the second day the Core Group helped me deliver two workshops at the outdoor seating area. Some students created freestanding towers using lessons learnt about structural strength learnt in the previous workshops, whilst other students constructed tetrahedrons for a hanging mobile.

All of these activities were filmed by Hounsdown Students for a short documentary film about the project.