Refelction: Math Art Project

The Mart Art project my group has chosen is a permutation arts model, which created by a high school math teacher, Chris Nho from Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Permutations explores questions about how many ways you can arrange several different objects. The print used four simple colour patters to attract the audience to wonder about patterns and structures. We choose it because it is easy to operate in school and meet with the high school curriculum, Permutation. We notice all stages children are playing with patterns and structures. Therefore, we chose the playful designs, such as colourful hearts, animal cartoons to represents the different objects. We hope the colour hearts pattern might increase the younger students’ interest while the cartoon pictures might meet the higher-grade students’ attention.

We invited young kids, teenagers and young adult to play with the art projects. The youngest kid needs more support to figure out the heart patterns while the 19-years boy could deal with more complicated requirement. Two teenager students performed in the middle; they spent a long time, and made few mistakes during the process, but could figure out the result more independent than the younger boy. All three groups of students actively involved in playing with the patterns. During our presentation in class, four different groups showed different solutions to solve the problem. The first group is more abstract, they used numbers to represent the different cartoon shapes. The second group used the name of the animals on the tree diagram. The first two groups only showed a simplified (part of the whole tree) to show their ideas. However, the third group drew the complete five layers tree diagram. The fourth group developed their strategy is based on the ancient practice that they count the five objects solution based on the result of the four objects, so they conclude that like 5 X24 =120. The whole process of the project showed that the diverse in math thinking.

The art project changed my mind. First, although the permutation is listed in grade 12 high school curriculum, all ages kids have the potential to explore the problem by hand-on exercise. Second, using the hand-on practice to help students with a relational understanding of concepts might much better than using instrumental formula. Students might be much easier to recall the concept of counting principle and permutation from the colourful hand-on memory. Finally, the project helped me to develop a growth mindset. I had a fixed mindset that I could not do arts, but this project showed me hope. Even I have weak hand skill in painting, I still can create an art project by using computer tools.