Author: Philipp Larmann

We are very happy to welcome the Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades (CCH), the first Mexican MathCityMap partner school in our international partner school network!

CCH applied with two trails, which can be found on the web portal and in the MCM App as follows:

• El Paseo matemático CCH Naucalpan 2022, Code: 3910980
  
• El Paseo matemático CCH 2023, Code: 4813875
  

David Sánchez, a teacher at CCH, initiated the application and tells us about the school community’s enthusiasm for Mathtrails and MathCityMap:

Due to the International Mathematics’ day, the “Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades (CCH)” campus Naucalpan inagurated the 2023 Mathematical Walk edition.  

Currently, the initiative belongs to “CCHN” Mathematician, College Academic and Library Director Dr. Ignacio Renero Ambros who has been a user and promoter of the MathCityMap application for two years among students and colleagues.  

The idea of carrying out a first Mathematical Walk started in 2022, once everyone came back to face-to-face classes at “Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México” was announced. By the time, one of the problems to be faced was that students didn’t know their campus at all because of the pandemic, in addition to the fact that most of them had remained seated in front of their electronic devices for long time. Thus, with the necessity of knowing the most important buildings of the campus and promoting the physical activation, a tour was designed with twelve Mathematical challenges that would address Arithmetic and Geometry basic topics.   

Thanks to the motto “Walk, Calculate and Make History”, the “CCH Naucalpan 2022 Math Walk” was well received, and generated nearly 300 downloads. Some of his challenges were related to calculating areas between two figures, determining inaccessible altitudes, Mathematical language, evaluating expressions, and even searching for numerical clues in the library.  

This remarkable experience encouraged the head of the library to prepare a second tour, but now dedicated especially to second-year high school students. Due to this, on March 14^th in a contest against the clock, more than a hundred students faced 10 new tasks dedicated to the calculation of inaccessible angles, equations of ellipses, circumferences and even horizontal shooting. Some of the challenges whose names were recognized the most were “El bebedero del diablo” (The Devil’s Drinker) , “Un grito de sed desesperado” (A Desperated Cry of Thirst) and “La escalera de Dios” (The Ladder of God). 

The school received the news of the publication of the second route in MathCityMap after the teams won the 2023 Math Walk so it was decided to apply to this platform to be part as an Associated School, becoming the first school in Mexico with this recognition.  

“El Matematico” from CCH campus Naucalpan will give the first MathCityMap workshop for teacher in this inter annual period so he hopes to get several collaborators for his most ambitious project, which will be called “University City, Mathematical City”, a mega route inspired by the work of Ítalo Calvino and whose headquarters will be the campus at “Máxima Casa de Estudios” in Mexico” which can be traveled by bicycle.

All further information about the partner school program and the requirements for the application can be found in the article about the first MCM partner school as well as on the homepage of our project MaSCE³.

For the Trail of the Month for May, we head to the city of Ávila in Spain, located west of Madrid. Here, the Sociedad Castellana y Leonesa de Matemáticas de Ávila created the mathtrail “XV OLIMPIADAS MATEMÁTICAS”. The trail is available in the MathCityMap app under the code 281469 and can be found in the web portal under this link.

The trail consists of a total of 12 tasks dealing with different mathematical topics and was designed in the Parque de los Patos, a park in the heart of Ávila.

Rubén Jiménez Jiménez, a member of the Sociedad Castellana y Leonesa de Matemáticas de Ávila, who was also involved in creating the mathtrail, tells us about the background of the trail in a short interview.

How did you come across the MathCityMap project?

Our association and our work is closely interwoven with the FESPM, one of the largest associations for mathematics teachers in Spain. MathCityMap was presented by FESPM at several meetings and since then we have been using the app and the application in our activities. The trail presented here was created as part of our Mathematics Olympiad, which we are now running for the second time with MathCityMap. It’s always been a very successful experience.

Where is your trail located? What is special about your trail?

This Mathtrail was designed to be used in a park in our city, Ávila, Spain. It’s thought to be used by children between 14 and 16 years old. The environment where we work is an amazing place with a lot of kids’ enterteinment, trees, flowers, a lake, some peculiar litters made of a cilinder shape and many more interesting mathematical objects.

How do you usually use MCM?

Describe your favorite task on the trail. How can it be solved?

Measuring a cilinder litter is my favorite task of the trail. Although it is quite easy, I like this task because the pupils have to decide which measures they need, in this case, height and diametre.

In my opinion, all tasks are rich to learn Mathematics. Each one offers something different to all students.  

In our new category “Popular Mathtrails” we want to present a mathtrail once a month that has had a particularly high number of app downloads in recent weeks.

In the month of April, one of the most popular trails was the “Thales-30-03-2023” trail, which was created by the mathematics teacher Daniel Partal Garcia in the city centre of Granada, in Spain.

Daniel normally uses MathCityMap as a teaching method in his mathematics classes at Maristas High School in Granada, as he tells us in a short interview. However, he is also involved, together with other colleagues, in the Spanish mathematics association THALES, which organised a competition between 10 schools in Granada using MathCityMap on 30 March.

A total of about 400 students between the ages of 14 and 16 took part in the competition, where the aim was to solve as many of the 25 tasks on the trail as possible and collect points. The students worked in groups of four and each group downloaded the trail, which was certainly the reason for the great success of this trail.

Of course, the winners of the competition also received prizes in the form of calculators, USB sticks and books sponsored by the companies CASIO, BEEP technology and EDELVIVES. A local newspaper also reported on the many students who explored the city centre of Granada equipped with smartphones and measuring tools.

For Daniel and his colleagues, the competition with MathCityMap was a complete success and they are already planning a repeat with a new trail in March 2024.

Less than 10 months ago, we already had 40,000 tasks on the MathCityMap web portal. Now the MathCityMap team is celebrating over 60,000 tasks and has reached another milestone on the way to making outdoor mathematics and mathtrails an experience throughout Europe.

Our anniversary tasks, which cracked the 60,000 mark, was created by Teresa Vinal Gómez in Orihuela a city in southeastern Spain ans asks about the characteristics of Gothic architecture at Orihuela Cathedral. Click here to go to the task.

We are looking forward to many more MatchCityMap tasks and we are curious when we will reach the next mark of 70,000 tasks!

MathCityMap was planned from the very beginning as a sustainable and long-term project with a perspective for the future, and in order to continue to do justice to this basic principle, some of the project partners from all over Europe met in Frankfurt at the end of January to develop new ideas.

Representatives from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Estonia, Austria, Slovakia and Germany spent the day engaged in many activities and working groups to identify features and opportunities that MathCityMap can develop, based on feedback from the community, teachers and academics, to provide an even more effective and comprehensive tool and learning environment for the classroom.

We are very excited to be able to present the new ideas and the focus of the development of MathCityMap to you in near future! Stay tuned…

All good things come in threes! With the successful application of the Istituto Comprensivo “Commenda”, there are now three official MathCityMap partner schools in Italy. Maths teacher Manuela Saponaro created two trails in the vicinity of the school in Brindisi and tried them out with her students.

She told us about the trails she created and her experience with her class as follows:

“Both Math trail cross well-known places in the city and through tasks suitable for different school levels test students on various areas from numerical to geometric, trying to develop in them the ability to problem solving and encouraging creativity.

The trails were tested both with pupils of the school and with a group of Polish students and teachers during an Erasmus + project. The students were also provided with the paper file in addition to the use of the app, in order to then reflect on their task resolution methods.

The students initially seemed disoriented since the approach to the problem of Mathematics was different from what they had been accustomed to until then. After the initial surprise and further clarification on the use of the app, the dominant feeling was the excitement and the desire to win the challenge.

Elements of strength were certainly the playful approach and the collaboration between the boys. These felt free to make their contribution without fear of error, while we noticed hesitation in wanting to use the tips in order not to lose points … they wanted to make it on their own even at the risk of ending the chances of attempting.

A critical element that we observed was time management and the inability to adequately use measuring instruments. Moreover, thanks to this activity, gaps have clearly emerged on the contents that will be recovered and enhanced.

The course gave the opportunity to enhance the attention on some details of their city on which the students had never dwelt and become aware of how much mathematics was around them.

Even the Polish colleagues and the Italian teachers involved were enthusiastic and understood how this way of doing mathematics is highly engaging and inclusive and gives the possibility to solve real problems of reality.

The totality of the participants  following a questionnaire administered to them expressed the desire to include the use of Math City Map within the curricular activities or as an in-depth tool during the guided tours.”

The trails are available under the following names and codes in the MathCityMap system:

1. Matematica tra parchi e piazze (5710839)
2. Dal centro al Casale … passeggiata matematica (6910838)

In addition to the experiences Manuela Saponaro shared with us, she wrote an article for the 36° Convegno nazionale Incontri con la matematica, an important national conference on mathematics didactics in Italy, in collaboration with other mathematics teachers, Lucia Del Chiaro, Giovanna Zito and Eugenia Taranto. Here, the teachers reported on their previous activities with MathCityMap under the title “Matematica in città”.

The package with the official partner school badge and the MCM measuring instruments is already on its way to Italy and we are very much looking forward to receiving more applications from all over the world.

All further information on the partner school programme and the requirements for application can be found both in the article on the first MCM partner school and on the homepage of our MaSCE³ project.

Autumn was busy with training and implementation of MathCityMap trails across Slovakia.

At the end of September, the Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Nábrežná street in Nové Zámky held a project day, which was attended by all 9th grade pupils. They explored the town centre, the surroundings of the school and also the villages of Branovo and Dvory nad Žitavou by solving MCM trails. The Department of Mathematics of the Charles University in Zámov participated in this beautiful project.

Silvia Haringová, a PhD student from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, taught three groups of full-time and one group of part-time pre-service teachers for primary education students how to create and implement mathematical trails during the workshops. Sona Čeretková did the same activity for future secondary mathematics teachers.

Janka Medová and Silvia Haringová visited Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Duklianska street in Bánovce nad Bebravou, where they conducted training on mathematical trails. A teacher from Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Gorazdova street in Bánovce nad Bebravou prepared a mathematical trail in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes for his 6.A pupils in the school building. Doctoral students Katka Laššová and Silvia Haringová came to help him with the implementation of the trail with his pupils. 

Pre-service mathematics teachers Michal Fojtík and Peter Košt’ál prepared trails for pupils from grades 4, 5 and 9 in the primary and lower-secondary school in Slatina nad Bebravou. Janka Medová,  Katka Laššová, Silvia Haringová and Peter Košt’ál came to Slatina nad Bebravou to implement the trail.

Another trail took place at the United Catholic School in Nemšová, where the pupils of three classes of grade 5 solved tasks prepared for them by their teachers Veronika Meščánková and Majka Šimáková. The trail included both indoor and outdoor tasks. Janka and Silvia could not miss the realization again.

In the beautiful surroundings of Zaježovské Lazy, a workshop on mathematical trails was held for teachers from all over Slovakia, to whom the creation and implementation of MCM trails was presented by Silvia.

The webinar was another event to promote the trails among teachers from all over Slovakia. It was led by Silvia together with Veronika Bočková. It was attended by more than 150 participants.

Silvia also travelled with the trails to Skalica to Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Vajanského street, where she came to help the teacher Zuzka Chytilova and the 9th grade pupils prepare a trail for the 5th grade pupils.           

At the end of October Silvia conducted a training on MathCityMap trails in Stara Ľubovňa for teachers from the primary and lower-secondary school on Komenského street. Together with the teacher Libuše Hnátová, they prepared a trail around the school for the training.

In November, the Science and Technology Week took place in Slovakia. During this Silvia visited St. Mark’s Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Nitra and Silvia helped the teacher Kika Hazuchova, who had prepared the tasks in advance, to upload them to the MathCityMap portal. A few days later, they enacted the trail together with the pupils of 6th and 7th grade. Silvia also visited the grammar school Gymnasium of Ivan Kupec in Hlohovec, where she prepared and implemented a mathematical trail in the main square of Hlohovec for the pupils. During the Week of Science and Technology, Veronika Bočková carried out a home trail aimed at revising natural numbers at the Pribina Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Nitra with all 5th grade pupils.

As part of the course focused on mathematical problem solving, a former student of the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, now a teacher, Kristína Čierniková from the Primary and Lower-Secondary School of Pavol Demitra in Dubnica nad Váhom, came to talk to the future primary teachers about the activities she does with her pupils. She also shared with them her experiences with the implementation of mathematical trails, whether outdoors or indoors with the primary pupils, even with the pupils of the first grade. 

The mathematical trail focused on fractions, situated in the main building of the University, was attended by pupils from the out-of-school science and mathematics activity, which is supported by national project funded by the Agency for Research and Development APVV-20-0599 Intervention Programme in Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

The last MCM trail so far in this calendar year was tackled by pupils who came to the Open Day at the Faculty of Science and Informatics.

There were also other mathematical trails in this autumn period. We are aware that some were carried out in the Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Kanianka, the grammar school M.R.Štefánik Gymnasium in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, the Private Primary and Lower-Secondary School in Nová Dubnica, the St. Joseph’s United School in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and the Kukučínova Primary School in Detva.

We are delighted with the interest of teachers and schools in MathCityMap and look forward to continuing this great trend in our slovakian community in 2023.