A group of Queensbury Middle School students recently worked together to design a Math Trail connecting the school campus to the adjacent neighborhood, writes Nikki Crowe, QMS Math teacher. She defines a Math Trail simply as a walk to discover mathematics in the everyday world.
Throughout the month of May, this same group of QMS students crafted interesting math questions to be answered along the trail and those with an especially artistic eye helped to design a logo for the 2022 edition.
Some of the highlights of the Math Trail were estimating how long it would take to run 1 mile at the high school track, comparing the neighborhood car colors to national figures, locating teenage pine trees (it’s all about the whorls), and discovering π on the basketball court.
The NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics call for recognizing broad characteristics of mathematics such as communication, connections, reasoning, and problem solving. Math Trails are a medium to experience mathematics in all of these dimensions and work towards popularizing mathematics through out-of-school activities.
See below some photos of the Math Walk provided by Nikki Crowe:
