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[teacherartexchange] art and Math Research


From: Jean Womack (jeaneger_at_TeacherArtExchange)
Date: Sat Aug 20 2005 - 20:31:52 PDT

IDEA #1 - math and art

There is lots of math and measuring involved in layout and pasteup for a
graphic arts project. You can do it with a T-square and a triangle.

Here's a problem. You want to publish a newsletter that is 50 percent
advertising. Decide the size of your newsletter. You will need to publish
either 4 pages, 8 pages, 12 pages, etc, adding four pages (one sheet of
paper) each time. If it costs $700 to print 5,000 copies of a 4-page
newsletter,. and you want to make $2,000 profit for your time (which
includes designing the ads), how much should you charge for each ad? You
can make a table of these values. How many ads will you have if they are
each 1`/4 page? If half of them are 1/4 page and the rest are 1/8 page? How
much should you charge for those ads? What size are the ads? What should
you charge for someone to put their business card in the newsletter? Etc,
ad infinitum. Be sure to have them draw it out on paper, not just do the
math calculations.


I took a course in math for middle school students in which we were taught
that we should teach finding an area by adding areas of triangles. In this
method, the students are given a board with a grid, in which nails have been
hammered into the grid at the intersections of lines. Then the student
places rubber bands around the nails to form either a rectangular or
triangular area. They can construct an irregular geometric shape this way,
with a series of overlapping triangles.

As I looked at this wonderful board full of nails, it reminded me of a star
chart where you have the stars but they don't look like anything except dots
until you draw lines connecting them. So I made a kind of a star chart with
a woodburner into that board and arranged it so I could make a constellation
with the rubber bands. It seemed there were lots of artistic possibilities

IDEA #3 Tessellations

IDEA #4 building geometric forms out of paper. (Use patterns and decorate
them in colored pencil)

Jean Womack

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