Personal reflection on my math & art project

My Math & Art Project is “The symmetric 4-color simple imperfect square”. Ashley and I spent the whole weekend working on it. At the beginning, we were considering to use weave to rebuild this model. But when we started to rebuild, we found it is impossible to build this imperfect square only by weaving. Because the extended lines of squares in this model are not perpendicular, we cannot use weaving only to build it. Then we considered to add Fabric art and Chinese knot into our project. The crossing knot perfectly matches the center squares. It is so excited for me not only because we finally figure out how to build this center parts, but also because we add Chinese culture elements into our project. The whole rebuilding process is so interesting! We have chances to bring up new ideas and test these ideas. And during the whole process, we need to do deeper in our topic and figure out how it works. And when we try to combine Math world with Real world, it really needs us to use creativity. In my opinion, I think all math & art projects are very helpful and impressive. They provide many ideas for me and I think I can apply these ideas into my future class. In the past, I believed science subjects covers numbers of concepts and problems and to be honest, I think it was very difficult for math teachers to let every students enjoy solving math problems. But now I think we actually can try to combine math with many interesting topics for different styles of learners. For example, for those visual learners who prefer studying by pictures and graphs, we can let them try to color different planar graphs to test the 4-color Theory. And for those group learners who prefer studying in group, I think making Chinese knots could be a wonderful activity to help them work together and know more about imperfect squared squares. I really love this project activity. I hope in the future I can have chances to share this great activity with my students too.