Bringing Joy & Creativity to Math

By: Ashley Tewes, Chippewa Middle School

Algebra 1 and Algebra 2

There is nothing greater in teaching than witnessing students learning for others. This spring our Algebra 2 class closed our Conic Sections unit creating bubble wands that were donated to children battling cancer at the Children’s Hospital. It was incredible to witness high levels of engagement and empathy while students created their bubble wands.

The goal of this project was to create a bubble wand using conic section equations. Students started this project by creating their wand design in Desmos, an online graphing calculator that truly brings math to life. Through many different iterations of their projects, they finalized their designs, many of the wands nearing 50 equations. They were prompted to use equations of each of the conic sections we learned in the unit, circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas, but were left with little requirements as I wanted them to have a lot of freedom in creating their designs.

Next, students went down to our school’s Maker Space and transferred the Desmos designs to the 3D printer. We printed the wands using colorful filament. Each wand varied in size, but on average they were around 5 x 2 inches. Once the wands were printed, we had a lot of fun testing the wands to make sure they would blow bubbles. It was very enjoyable seeing 8th grade students having so much fun with bubbles.

The students loved this part of the project, however the part of the project that brought so much meaning was when students wrote a personalized letter to children at the Children’s Hospital that described their wand. Many students were eloquent in explaining that they wanted to take time from their school day to create something that would make someone else happy. After completing this project, I hope to find other ways to turn math projects into service learning projects where students are motivated to learn because they are helping others. This really brought our math project full circle and I am confident our students will remember this project for a long time to come.

Attached is the rubric students used when completing this project. What I enjoyed about the process of transferring from Desmos to the 3D printer shared by Leigh Mitchell (@MitchellAlg) was that it made it very possible to partner our STEAM Lab equipment with the math classroom without us having to spend a majority of the project time using the 3D printer. The majority of the time completing this project was spent using math in Desmos and focusing on human centered design.

This project was well received when shared on Twitter. Here were a few of my favorite ideas and reflections shared by others: