How to make math fun

I agreed to do an hour lesson/activity for a group of 12 year old boys on “math”… and then I completely forgot about it. The lesson is tomorrow evening :rofl:

It’s a small group, just a few boys. My thoughts when I agreed to this were around showing cool math visuals like fractals and such. I’d like to do a game or two if possible. My goal is to make it as interactive as possible, and as little lecture-like as possible.

Any suggestions from the group? I probably shouldn’t have forgotten I agreed to do this, but I’m hoping I (or you) can come up with some fun ideas by tomorrow evening.

TIA!

do they like sports?

Sports stats are a good way to get kids interested

I know I have at least 1 basketball and 1 football fan (2 different kids) so that’s a great idea, thank you!

Maybe they can try game development. Then you kind of have to just learn math in order to do it.

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Have them spin a dice and move around a monopoly board and show them that as they spin the dice more the spins fall around the expected probability. You can mark which properties were landed on most often and show them how math can help them strategize better.

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You can show them expected probability of different outcomes (HRs vs singles in baseball) and explain to them the analytics that everyone complains about. Maybe you can explain to them why the Bills went for 2 twice instead of kicking the extra point both times…

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Not interactive, but penrose tiles are also cool.

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Sierpinski triangle is pretty cool when it’s created by the random midpoint method.
It’s filled with points, yet it has zero area.

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I love examples of Fibonacci in nature

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The Boy Scouts have a lot of ideas for various things, and turns out they have a whole section on Math. Here’s a fun activity that we might do.

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I still remember proving that the Cantor set had infinitely many points but zero length in my intro to analysis course.

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Numberphile video on that:

Veritasium video on that:

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Thanks for saving me the time to look those up myself :rofl:

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We actually did that in college for physics class. I think I got 0.4 hp …but I don’t actually recall.

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I’m looking for a short (2-5 minute) video to kick off the night. Here are some candidates I’ve found. No idea how well these will go over with 12 year olds lol.

I’ve also thought about demonstrating the Monty Hall problem with candy or something. I’ve talked to them about it a while ago, and it might be fun to see if they remember to switch doors.

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Not sure where 12-year-olds are in their Education, but:

Pythagorean Theorem using only drawings.

Showing sum of three numbers cubed is equal to the square of the sum of the numbers, using that image shown here somewhere.

Found my “The Dangerous Book for Boys”… hmm, not much about math, but Pages 109-110 are important.
Page 198 is about playing poker (draw and hold 'em), and there are some odds included but no idea how they are determined. So, showing how they are determined would be math.

I am sure parents will be thrilled that their 12 year old learned how to play poker in school

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Come up with “The Game of Ruin”. Demonstrate how insurance is a transfer of risk and uses probability to price appropriately (both to be competitive and avoid insolvency).

Numberphile videos about one-roll yahtzees: