{"id":1888,"date":"2022-02-15T05:40:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T05:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terc.edu\/adultnumeracycenter\/?p=1888"},"modified":"2022-02-14T17:52:44","modified_gmt":"2022-02-14T17:52:44","slug":"making-art-learning-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terc.edu\/adultnumeracycenter\/making-art-learning-math\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Art, Learning Math"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Sarah Lonberg-Lew & Mark Trushkowsky<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In December of 2021, we (Sarah Lonberg-Lew and Mark Trushkowsky) embarked on a project to create a piece of art to submit to the Desmos Global Art Contest. Here is a still image of our submission:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Click here<\/a> to see it in all its animated glory. (And try clicking on some of the stationary objects for a little bonus.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Desmos<\/a> is an online platform for learning, teaching, exploring, and playing with math. For the art contest, we created our masterpiece using the graphing calculator<\/a>. That means that every point, curve, movement, and color is created by numbers and equations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our adventure started when Sarah discovered how to animate a small line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We invite you to play with this line for yourself. Visit Making Art, Learning Math<\/a>. Don\u2019t worry if you don\u2019t understand the math \u2014 that\u2019s not what this is about. (Mark says, \u201cI definitely didn\u2019t, and still I was able to play and learn!\u201d) You can play and explore by changing numbers and seeing what happens as a way to learn what is going on. What do you see?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For us, the line was evocative of a fish and so we tried to figure out how to add a head. The shape we added was bigger than we intended, but we thought it looked like a stingray and liked it, and thus MANTA was born!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Each day we worked and played, we also spent time reflecting on what was driving and sustaining our interest. We were making art together and that meant building a collaborative vision. It was a rich math learning experience, where we would pose problems determined by elements we were inspired to create \u2014 a spiral snail shell, multicolored urchin section, a sine wave clam shell lip, etc. Often we found ourselves in the position of not knowing the math we needed. Sometimes we tried something without really knowing what we were doing and we liked how it looked and we kept it. Sometimes we tried something and it was close to what we wanted but not quite right. In those cases, we experimented with changing different parts of our equations to see what effects the changes had. We leaned into the verb \u201cnoodling<\/em>\u201d to describe this process for ourselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We thought a lot about how students and teachers might learn from making art with a graphing calculator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting with an equation and experimenting with how changing elements of the equation impacts what you are looking at makes connections between abstract expressions and images. <\/strong>Experimenting with our equations and watching the effects in real time, making adjustments to tweak the results \u2013 these were rich reasoning experiences that had us thinking about numbers, relationships, direction, distances, angles, slopes, and more. Sometimes we found things we loved completely by accident. When we had an idea of what we wanted, it motivated us to learn and practice the skills we needed to create it. Some of those skills were pretty high level, but others were accessible to a lot of adult ed teachers and students. We asked questions like: <\/p>\n\n\n\n