My 4th grade students are currently studying mathematical masterpieces. I love showing them examples of the intersection of math and art. When I saw a tweet yesterday morning from @TheKidShouldSeeThis with a link to the video of John Edmark’s spiral geometries, I knew right away that they would want to watch the video. It weirdly connected with the magical drawbridge from yesterday’s video, so I showed that part to them first. We have already talked about Fibonacci and the Golden Spiral, so they immediately found ways to connect both videos to their learning.
Since the students have also been using Scratch coding, I found a Scratch project for making spirals. First we looked “inside” to decipher the code. Then the students explored running the program. After that, I talked about creative constraints, and gave them the challenge of changing one and only one part of the code to see how it made the program run differently. They recorded the results of their new programs and the class tried to guess what variable each student changed based on the videos. Then I gave them time to freely remix however many parts of the program they liked.
This was one of those times that the students could happily have explored all day. It was their first time remixing a program, and they delighted in trying to take it to the extremes by putting ridiculous numbers in to see how large or small or non-existent their spirals became. Some of them created spirals so tiny that they appeared to be flowers blooming as they popped on to the Scratch stage.
And I still haven’t blown their mind with this Vi Hart video yet. With the school year almost over, we may have to take this unit into their 5th grade year. There is so much beauty in math, and we have barely scratched the surface!
