Math Booth at Science Rendezvous 2022
May 7, 2022
Alex Busch
Science Rendezvous is a free family event that takes place annually across the country. The goal is to take science research from the lab to the street - to get kids excited about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) disciplines, showcase innovative research, and engage face-to-face with the community.
This year,
over 3000 people
attended the event at Western!
With 38 booths from over 15 different departments and clubs spread out around Alumni Stadium, and stage shows running all day, there was no shortage of activities and demonstrations for the families to participate in.
This year, AWM organized a booth called, “So you think you can math?”. Our booth was located right by the entrance, so we were the first ones to engage with so many different families. The event was particularly special since many of the kids’ field trips and planned events over the past two years were cancelled due to COVID, and this was the first time many of the younger ones had a chance to participate in a festival like this one.
We ran two main activities at our booth. First, in order to present math concepts in a friendly way, we made a number of ‘math monster’ buttons to give away. The bright monster designs helped generate interest in the math behind them: the kids could pick one they liked to bring home, and we would tell them a bit about the number or concept it depicted. It was a fun challenge for our volunteers to describe some of the higher-level ideas to younger children.
We handed out
~ 300
buttons!
There were infographics around to help with the explanation, for both the parents and the kids. It was great to see parents taking pictures of the infographics and asking us to make them available online!
Our second activity was an interactive video display, where the kids could pose or dance around in front of the webcam and monitor, which displayed a distorted video stream. The program remapped the image to different colors based on the sum of the pixels’ RGB values, and used an edge-detection algorithm to create thick, sketch-like outlines, resulting in a comic-book-like image. The kids had fun taking pictures of themselves “cartoonified”, while we had a chance to talk about edge detection using derivatives and the way computers “see” colors as numbers.
Children were not the only ones curious about our booth - we also received a lot of interest from parents! Some of them had studied math in the past, and were excited to tell us about their experiences or refresh some of the ideas they had forgotten about. Others had never studied math and were just as curious as their kids to learn about fractals, irrational numbers, and how we made the video filter.
The event was far busier than we expected, so we learned a few things for next year, too. We originally planned an activity where the kids were challenged to find fractals in nature magazines, which they could cut out and turn into a button. We quickly realized it was too busy, the kids needed more help cutting out the fractals than we anticipated, and the button maker struggled with the thick, glossy paper. We decided to keep the magazines out but stop making the customized buttons - there were lineups at the booth all day, even without that slow-down! The kids had fun finding repeating patterns in the images, though, so with some modifications, it could be a more successful activity next year.
Overall, it was a very busy and successful day. We are so grateful for our 10 amazing volunteers - we could not have done it without you! We are also thankful for the funding we received from NeuroNex that made our activities possible. It was a great experience to see so many kids asking questions and engaging with math concepts. And, of course, walking around the event and seeing hundreds of kids wearing math monster buttons was a nice touch, too!
