Do you remember when you dreaded walking into your next class? It may have felt a little like placing yourself into jail—you knew the time in that room was going to be very slow and painful. For too many, math was that class.
It no longer has to be that way. We challenged the premise that most kids will dislike, even hate math. We wanted to make math fun. Our hypothesis: if it is fun, just about every kid will want to practice and master the subject. At the very least, we will have provided an immunization for math rash. So, the experiments began.
The first experiment was to make a wooden box with wheels.
math on wheels seats
Kids, and–we must admit–adults loved moving around on these new contraptions. You could spin around and glide around the floor with ease. Ok, so what does this have to do with math? We devised a golden ratio rectangle and asked kids to make a complete cycle around (52 feet) on their math–on–wheels box. We timed them and asked: how fast do you think you went? They could not get enough of trying to beat their previous time by applying the formula: Rate = Distance/Time. After twenty minutes, we had to stop them from practicing math. Well, we didn’t have to stop them, but there were more experiments for them to try. We repeated this experiment over 20 times with the same results.