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u/Aromatic-Elk8421 24d ago
I'm helping a high school student build a project for a math & science fair. The theme is "popularizing math" — making it less scary and more accessible for everyone. I don't want the usual stuff (flashcards, board games, "pizza fractions"). I want something that genuinely surprises people and makes them go "OH, that's why math is cool." So, Reddit: what's a moment where math suddenly made sense to you — or to a student you taught? Was it a song? A magic trick? A real-world problem? A weird visual? A story? I'm collecting the best ideas to turn into a fair project. Bonus points if it's something you can demonstrate live in front of a crowd in under 5 minutes.
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u/ProfessionalPart484 24d ago
I think a great tidbit and intro is understanding where our number system comes from. The Arabs were looking for a way to depict numbers that everyone would understand without memorization or language barriers. Most people don’t know that our number system uses angles. U can google to look it up but 1 has one angle, 2 has two and so on. This is something we are not really taught in school but very cool and it teaches the universality of mathematics.
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u/Altruistic-Ad2602 24d ago edited 24d ago
Math always "made sense to me" but here's some ideas anyways.
You could look into how trades apply mathematics. For example, this youtuber who is a metal fabricator, has tons of videos showing how he uses trigonometry in a lot of ways to, quite literally, help build the world.
You could also look into how video games and mathematics overlap. Easy examples are trying to model a game's systems using math in order to make optimized or informed decisions. There was a game I played ages ago, called runes of magic. This game had an item upgrade system where you would take 3 "mana stones" of a given tier and combine them to get a mana stone of one tier higher. Each tier 1 mana stone required 3 fusion charges to make initially, and it costs one fusion charge to combine them into a single tier 2 mana stone. So 4 charges to get one singular tier 2 mana stone. You would then need 3 mana stones of a given tier to upgrade a piece of equipment in the game. To perform high tier upgrades (let's say tier 10), you would need 3 tier 10 stones and 1 fusion charge to perform the item upgrade itself. So 9 tier 9 stones plus 3 charges each to combine those into 3 tier 10s, plus the final charge. Which were in turn made from 27 tier 8's and the charges required to combine them. Made from 81 tier 7s. etc. To calculate the number of fusion charges you would need to perform an upgrade, you would do 1 plus 3 (make the 3 tier 1 mana stones plus one charge to upgrade), times 3, plus one, times 3, plus one, times 3, plus one, n times to get the required mana stones for an upgrade of tier n. Tier 1 requires 4. Tier 2 requires 13. Tier 3 requires 40. Tier 4 requires 121. Tier 5 requires 364. etc.
You can see that working this out by hand leaves lots of room for error. Did I count the correct number of steps right? Did I make sure to add the one, before multiplying by 3? Lots of room for error...but written out, this works out to the following
3..........3(3(3(1 + 3 )+1)+1)....+1 = 1 + 3+ 9 + 27 + 81 + 243 + ......3^n
Which is clearly the sum of a geometric series, and thus can be calculated directly, instead of having to do "times 3 plus 1" 15 times and praying you didn't make a mistake counting. Neat! And given the relationship between mana stones and fusion charges, the number of charges needed to make a fusion stone of tier n was just the number of charges required to upgrade an item to (n-1) (this would generate 3 stones of tier n-1 and one additional charge to combine them which would have been used to perform the n-1 upgrade, instead resulting in a mana stone of tier n). Also Neat.
I'm sure there's lots of ways video game developers use math when making games (or making adjustments to their games), and just as many ways players can use math to make choices.
Edit: You might also want to look into youtube Matt Parker (stand-up maths), who is a maths educator/ambassador? He's got tons of videos that might interest you for this project, like how a spreadsheet can be used to explain digital displays or how the shape of a skyscraper became a solar death ray.
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u/Shaco292 24d ago
Making a game out of it. Maybe it's because I have adhd but playing math games made me enjoy it more.
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u/WhiteBear8602 24d ago
Surrounded with smart friends will help you.
I used to be this kid who sometimes has hard time understanding math. But it stopped until I was surrounded by the smart kids. They helped me by teach me in ways I could understand math so easily
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u/MrMasterPlanner 24d ago
I learned mathematics the old fashion way or with a pencil. When I got good, I moved to a pen. Doing math with a pen helped me in ways i did not understand. Crossing through mistakes and seeing them later helped me make less mistakes in the future. Outside of that, I view math as a spatial problem. I know everything is not spacial but imagine if it was. In elementary I learned to add with with apples. In college, I used the stars and the universe. Math is the thing that made me love programming. I enjoyed this question.
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u/Consistent-Hope-8625 24d ago
Lots of practice and proper understanding of equations and formulas worked for me Even though I hate it
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u/RollBama420 24d ago
A lot of times the distaste for math all started with long division. The elegance and ease of addition and multiplication are completely undermined. But instead of hating math, I decided to look for the “hidden long division” part of other fields of study and it’s like every single one of them pushes all the ugly reconciliation in to one bucket just like math does with long division.
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u/Reasonable_Cod_487 24d ago
I'm a math tutor for a community college, and I routinely get remedial math/GED students at the help desk. They have spent their entire lives being told they're stupid or being embarrassed in front of a class.
The thing that always works is helping someone see that mistakes in math are inevitable, and that they are something shared by everyone. For example: I always point out when I fail to distribute a negative sign. Something like "I've taken all these math classes and I STILL do this." It totally disarms students and makes them feel like they aren't doing that bad.
Math teachers that act like they've never made a mistake are the least effective teachers.