Liberty Students Visit Math Museum

Math came alive for some middle school students earlier this month.

A total of 36 students went to the new MoMath Museum in New York City on May 10^th.   The interactive museum, which is geared
toward students in fourth through eighth grades, opened this past December with 34 exhibits in the two floor building.

The trip was organized by Shrina Patel, an eighth grade mathematics teacher at Liberty Middle School.

Upon entering the museum, the students were introduced to a session on cryptography and shown how to encrypt and decrypt code using a substitution cipher.  Most of the displays were interactive and allowed the students to use angles, rotations, symmetries, tessellations and other mathematical properties to gain a greater understanding of mathematics.    

At one exhibit, which was called Tessellation Station, the students used different shapes and figures of animals to create larger figures.  At another stop, the “Square-Wheeled Trike,” presented the students with a tricycle with square wheels that the students were able to move through the room slowly.

Another exhibit, which was named Human Tree, allowed the students to see smaller copies of themselves to create a fractal tree that moved in response to their motions.   

“Unlike many museums it was very interactive,” eighth grade student Kefi Mutume said.  “We were able to explore and touch different
exhibits which made the museum so much fun.”

Prior to the trip, the students were encouraged to create a project connecting mathematics to something in real life. Some of the projects included writing mathematical sport-related facts on a soccer ball, creating storybooks about numbers, geometric figures, or math facts, and collages of how math is used in the real world. 

“It was great to have the students have an opportunity to see math used in so many real-world applications,” Patel said. “The students appeared to have a great time and I hope we have the opportunity to do this again in the future.”

According to the MoMath website, the mission of the museum is to “strive to enhance public understanding and perception of mathematics. Its dynamic exhibits and programs will stimulate inquiry, spark curiosity, and reveal the wonders of mathematics. The museum’s activities will lead a broad and diverse audience to understand the evolving, creative, human, and aesthetic nature of mathematics.”