Category: General

A mathtrail that fits perfectly into our category “Popular Mathtrails” is the trail “Prechádzka na ZŠ Duklianska pre 5 ročníkn” which was created by the experienced MathCityMap author Silvia Haringová in the Slovakian town of Bánovce nad Bebravou. Consisting of a total of six tasks, the trail gained 119 app downloads in June.

In a short interview, Silvia tells us how this came about:

What is the trail about? What is your favourite task of the trail?

The trail is designed to repeat the curriculum of the 5^th grade. In the trail pupils solve, for example how many times longer does it take to decompose a plastic bag than paper or they find out how many euros it cost to replace the posts on the fence that borders the playground.

My favourite task in this trail is “Volleyball court”.

This is an application task in which pupils help the janitor find out the sum of the lengths of all the yellow stripes of the volleyball court, because the janitor wants to repaint them.

Why do you think the trail was it downloaded that often?

The trail was downloaded often, because at the end of the school year, the teachers let all the 5^th grade students solve this trail, but it was also solved by the 9^th graders, who gradually solved the trails for the 5^th to 8^th grade. The teachers let them repeat the curriculum of the entire second grade of elementary school in this way.

Already the seventh partner school in Portugal! We are very pleased that the Garcia de Orta school association has successfully applied to become the first partner school in the northern Portuguese city of Porto.

The application was made with two of the numerous trails that have since been created and published at and around the school:

“Um passeio na Foz do Douro” which can be found in the app under the code 013089.

Also, “Escola Garcia de Orta“, a classic school trail that has the code 592281.

In their application, the school writes: “We are committed to creating and using this challenging application, in the creation of mathematical trails, to use with our students, with the aim of motivating and enhancing the study of Mathematics.” In addition, it makes an appeal to other schools, which we of course support: “Get to work, Mathematics is everywhere!”

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

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.

As our Trail of the Month for June, we would like to introduce the Mathtrail Freiburg, which, as the name suggests, is located in the southern German city of Freiburg. The trail can be found in the app under the code 1412574 and in the web portal under this link.

The trail consists of a total of eight tasks on diverse mathematical topics and was created as part of the international ICSE Academy project. What ICSE is and what makes this trail special is described in a short interview with one of the authors, Silvia Haringová.

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

The trail is situated in the historic centre of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau. This trail was designed as an illustration for partners of the project ICSE Academy by Silvia Haringová, Janka Medová and Martin Cápay from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia.

What is the project ISCE and why was working with MCM benefitial for the project?

The International Centre for STEM Education at the University of Education Freiburg, Baden-Würtenberg, Germany (ICSE) is a research and networking centre focusing on a future-oriented development of STEM education in Europe. It is working closely together with the ICSE Consortium and other Partners in European projects to further develop and disseminate innovative teaching approaches in STEM education. Currently, they are working on various projects concerning environmental socio-scientific issues (MOST, ENSITE), the empowerment of girls in STEM (GEM) and the development of transversal skills in class rooms (STEMKey), as well as the professional development of teachers (3C4Life).

The ICSE Academy is a project where universities, schools and school authorities from 13 European countries work together aiming at development of STEM teacher education, both initial teacher education and  professional development of in-service teachers. As shown by our work in Slovakia, MCM trails have big potential in stimulating teacher collaboration and co-design. Furthermore, MCM trails also fit with European priorities as defined in ICSE Academy project, they prepare pupils for life in digital era, teach them to collaborate and communicate their ideas, provide reasoning and also offer the opportunities to bring environmental issues in mathematics education.

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

We create trails in different cities and states and the triangular shape is usually hard to find, so we were very happy to come across it in the city centre. Because of this fact, my favourite task is called Kornhaus passage.

The task is related to a triangle made of stone blocks. The user has to determine the circumference and the area of this triangle. For this, corresponding measurement data must be collected. Afterwards, one only needs the formulas for the perimeter and the area of a triangle.

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…