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Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science,
Durham NC |
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Entrance
Visitors approach the colorful exhibit area, pass by the introductory panel with an invitation to “play with math” and begin their experience at any exhibit that catches their interest.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Origami Folds
Visitors can fold a simple cup from a touchable model, or follow on-screen instructions to fold a cicada, crane, bat, frog, or butterfly. An origami “zoo” shows how complex paper folding can become, while a model shows how physicists used origami to fold a giant telescope lens into a spacecraft – a real life application of changing one shape into another.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Quilting
Quilters use many types of symmetry to create the beautiful patterns of a quilt. With a handmade quilt as a backdrop, visitors gather around the quilting table to design their own quilt patterns and talk, just as in days of old.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Tiling Shapes
The challenge to completely cover a surface with tiling blocks makes exploring the relationship between shapes—and fractions—fun in this hands-on activity.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Reflecting on Patterns
Visitors play with table-top mirrors and look through a kaleidoscope exploring how mirrors reflect and multiply images.
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Shapes in the Shadows
Guess the object hidden in the box by using only the clue of its shape in a shadow. Common household items are look surprising when you look at them from different perspectives, and the activity introduces the idea of dimension.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Puzzling Shapes
How can a 3D shape fit through a 2D shape? At these two puzzles, visitors fit two unusually shaped blocks through holes that won’t seem to accommodate the blocks at first sight.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Measure Up
Visitors contribute data to a graph depicting height versus shoe size, and make assumptions using all the data on the graph. Mathematics provides the tools to examine relationships among variables, and is easy to see in this graph!
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Where’s the Beat?
Visitors create their own music rhythms and see a graphical representation of their beat selection.
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| Photo courtesy of Museum of Life and Science, Durham NC |
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Size it Up
Everyday people make comparisons about size while grocery shopping, cutting the last piece of cake, or lining up at school by height. Visitors test their estimation ability at Shopping for Volume by ordering oddly shaped bottles in order of volume. Explore the relationship among shapes (and the formula for volume!) by comparing the size of 5 different cups to see which holds more, or a tall, thin cylinder, versus a short wide cylinder, or see how many spheres fill a cone if they have the same diameter at the base.
Patterns Around Us
Where do you see patterns? This display of rugs, floor and ceiling tiles, pots, and photographs help visitors to recognize patterns they see everyday, but might not notice.
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Description  Itinerary Walkthrough |
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