Math Festival Kits

At the broadest level, a math festival is a group of people playing with mathematics. The activities, puzzles, and games are accessible on many levels.  They captivate everyone from young children through PhDs. Activities involve choices, play, the chance to make mistakes with no consequences. They involve mathematical practices and problem solving strategies.  

You can experience a math festival an many different sizes: a school classroom, a math family night, an after or outside of school gathering, a large dedicated festival with 100s of people, or a community wide festival with a booth dedicated to playing wtih math.

The Math Festival Kit is a collection of activities and materials that you can use to put on your own math festival. We noticed that many teachers wanted to have math festivals for their schools and classrooms, but had to find their own materials and were sometimes duplicating each others' efforts.  

Through the generous support of IMACS and the NCSU Math Department, the freely available activities of JRMF, along with the labor or many of our members, the Triangle MTC assembled materials for 12 activities.  The materials in the kit have been used for math festivals at elementary school family nights, homeschool gatherings, after school clubs, classrooms, community festivals, math circles, and many more places, with groups from 15 to over 100 people.  We chose these activities because they are interesting and engaging, don't require much set-up to learn, and help students experience joy in doing math. 

The Kit consists of a box with individually packaged activities.  Each activity has instructions and supplies for up to 5 stations which can accommodate 1 or more participants. Each activity also has a card which shows how to set up the station and suggests ways to facilitate the activity. We also include notes from the JRMF website which have answers to puzzles.

Our current puzzles, from the JRMF website: 

1. Apple Picking

2. Cup stacking

3. Dice bingo

4. Domino dissection

5. Doodles

6. Jumping Julia

7. Konigsberg

8. Ladybugs

9. Magic Flowers

10. River Crossings

11. Skyscrapers

12. Tile with style

• You could hold a festival.  Contact Kim Johnson (mathmom.nc@gmail.com) to get information about scheduling and planning.

• We are looking for sponsors for a second box.  The cost is relatively low ($500-$1000) while the impact is huge (potentially thousands of students, teachers, and families around the Triangle area). 

• We are looking for creators interested in contributing activities, puzzles, and materials to further math festival kits.