Lessons from the #BlueTapeLounge [TMC14 Recap #2]

TMC14 (Twitter Math Camp) was an amazing experience for me. Christopher Danielson and I collaborated on a morning session on embodied mathematics, juxtaposing familiar hand-based manipulatives with body-scale math/dance learning. You can read the Storify of our morning activities to get a sense of what we did.

In the evening, after dinner, some folks hung out in the back lobby of the hotel which included a little uncarpeted room with an ice machine and the path to the hotel pool. It's also where I decided to put down some blue tape and see what might happen.

What happened was that some of the folks from our embodied mathematics morning session taught other folks the math/dance steps they had choreographed earlier in the day. I was incredibly touched to see my math teachers/dance learners start by orienting their new dance partner to the square, showing them the many different ways they could move around that space and THEN teach the dance step.

The slide show and the videos below will give you a great idea of some of what went on, but here are the lessons I learned during those two amazing evenings.

1. You don't know what math you can learn while dancing or at body-scale until you actually do it.

2. Even experienced math teachers can have new mathematical challenges and insights at body scale.

3. It's useful and interesting to learn someone else's math/dance step, but even more interesting (and mathematical) to make up your own.

4. Dancing mathematically can lead to all sorts of new questions, but it doesn't always make for a dance that really works. This one was great, but the final version was better.

5. You can have a ton of new math questions while dancing, but sometimes you need to take the time to let your body catch up so whatever you're trying to express in the dance can look the way you want it to. 

The video below shows us still in practice mode. The final video (#6 below) shows obvious gains in fluency (practice makes permanent!)

6. When you make up your own math/dance step you start having new and very mathematical questions. Max wondered if you could make up a 4-beat pattern that would look beautiful when danced in all four quadrants of the coordinate plane.

The slideshow below is sequenced to illustrate the progression of people coming to the Blue Tape Lounge to experience and know mathematical patterns within a percussive dance system. THANK YOU to all who participated and observed these two amazing nights' worth of inquiry.

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(In) Person Power [TMC14 Recap #1]

Last week I drove 22 hours round trip to be at my first Twitter Math Camp (TMC) for three days. During that time I co-led a morning session with Christopher Danielson (two hours a day over three days) focused on embodied mathematics both at body- and hand-scale. You can read the Storify recap I created to get a sense of some of the things we did. I think it captures the spirit of TMC as a whole -- focused, intense and active with moments of pure hilarity.

I also instigated the after hours event known as The Blue Tape Lounge, had some very fruitful investigations into body-scale number lines with Max Ray in some in-between times, and spent countless hours in conversations with a number of fascinating folks over meals, all of whom have been instrumental in my growth over the past year or two on Twitter.

Each one of these experiences was interesting, engaging and often profound for me. I will be telling a few more stories over the next week but, to start, it's actually part of someone else's reflection that creates the best overview of what the experience meant to me.

One of the new folks I met was James Cleveland who hung out in the Blue Tape Lounge and contributed to the number line investigations. Here's what he had to say at the end of his post on TMC14:

"The last thing I did on Saturday was to take place in a body-scale number line exploration led by Max Ray and Malke Rosenfeld. I got to share my insights and experiences with number lines that others may not have had, I got to see it in other people’s eyes, and I experienced new revelations and am excited to dive into them deeply.

"This last thing leads me to my final thought. During our work with the number line, Malke constantly pushed back – what are we actually gaining by working with the number line using our bodies, instead of just paper and pen? It pushed us to keep developing new insights and sharing them until one moment I heard Malke make an involuntary gasp – there was a moment of breakthrough, one we never would have had without using our bodies.

"So you could ask the same question – what do we gain from using our bodies to meet in person at TMC, instead of just writing to each other as we do in the MTBoS? There’s this energy that infuses all of it that you can’t feel remotely, these deep experiences and quiet moments that can’t be done publicly, this sense of connection that makes all the other work we do more powerful." 

One of those experiences that can only happen in person was the interaction of moving bodies in familiar mathematical spaces, like the coordinate plane, pictured here:

This picture illustrates one of my favorite things of the whole event: getting to watch the reactions of the math people interacting with familiar math ideas in a completely new and novel situation. And that is the subject of my next post: Tales from the Blue Tape Lounge.  Talk to you again soon!