Sunday, October 12, 2014

Cross-Curricular Math Ideas




I find Cross-Curricular Teaching very essential. In my opinion, it provokes and creates deep learning and engages the whole student –his heart, mind, body, and soul. This website takes you to “Cross-Curicular Math” resources created for you to explore how Math can be connected with other subjects and how it is needed in a real life.
This web site, I would like to share with you, will take you into some deeper cross-curricular ideas, such as Exploring how Math is used in helping to restore medieval frescoes; How can Math help us understand musical pitch and rhythm; or How mathematicians and scientists use experiments to model what happens in avalanches by using collecting data and displaying their findings with graphs. Just watching this I am ready to teach with more of Cross-Curricular Maths Resources shared on MOTIVATE:

 

 
How about using Math when creating a movie with students. 
How do they create those incredibly life-like computer generated images in the movies? 
They say, that one of the basic movements an object can perform is a rotation around a given axis and through a given angle.



  
Co-ordinate geometry gives us the tools to calculate the position of each point on the object after it has been rotated. They definitely use and need Math for that. 
See for yourself an article created by Joan Lasenby:    http://plus.maths.org/content/maths-goes-movies

 

We can start with motivating your students just by watching this creative team working behind the scene in Pixar Studios: 

   

4 comments:

  1. Hi Anka, This was a great blog!! I m actually researching more on cross-curricular Math ideas to apply in my teaching and the website you introduced is giving me great ideas to use in my classroom. Thanks for the great blog :)

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  2. I`m glad you found it useful. In my opinion everything connects with everything in some way and can make a perfect sense when we connect it all together. Have lots of fun with cross-curricular Math ideas.

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  3. Thank you for the great links. I especially enjoyed checking out "math goes to the movies" and watching the Pixar video. This area of technology (animation) has moved forward in leaps and bounds and I don't think many students appreciate what exactly is behind it all in terms of education requirements. With the focus on career exploration in the secondary school panel in all subject areas, I think these two resources would be great to show to classes and explore this field as a career choice. It may peek some students interest to pursue it further, and it would open up all students eyes to appreciate the creativity and hard work that goes in to creating animation.

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  4. This is a nice resource to know, thank you. I think a lot about how math can be incorporated into other subject areas since it seems to be the more difficult one to do. I know as a high school teacher, we push literacy ALL the time EVERYWHERE, but I don't feel the same push with mathematics. I try to incorporate math where I can in my English classes, but I don't see the same amount of resources for cross-curricular math opportunities as I do with literacy.

    I'd love to see even more on this site. I clicked on the media link, and the film aspect is cool, but I'd love to see photography as well. I was actually thinking about the connections between math and photography (although I suppose it's a best fit for science/physics) and doing a post on that, but I changed my mind.

    I think it's great to try to see math in as many subject areas as possible since a common complaint with students is that they don't understand how math is used in the real world (beyond money math and maybe measurement).

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