On Chapin’s fifth floor, Heather Vardis, one of our Middle School (MS) Math teachers, introduced her students to graphing. The girls learned to identify the X and Y-axes, how to plot data points and how to read and interpret the graphical information — but Ms. Vardis wanted her students to go beyond the basics. She wanted them to think abstractly about data and consider how they can apply it in their daily lives.
After learning graphing fundamentals, Ms. Vardis asked her students to collect data from their personal lives — anything that interested the girls. As an example, for cataloging their socks they would consider: How many pairs of socks do they have? What categories of socks are in their drawer? How many are there of each type? Once their data was collected, they began to organize it. Some was categorical data (qualitative), which they kept in tiny notebooks with tie dye patterned covers, and the remainder was numerical data (quantitative), which they turned into graph packets for reference. All of this would become the basis for their graphing projects. The students didn’t know it yet, but in the following class, Ms. Vardis would introduce art to her math classroom.
For their first of two artistic math endeavors, the girls learned they would write songs using their numerical data. To introduce this concept, Ms. Vardis shared a video where temperature data was transformed into a climbing musical scale. To illustrate this process, she shared how she had created a song using her own data. Thoroughly impressed and intrigued, the students were ready to try this out for themselves!
Ms. Vardis distributed transparent sheet music and expo markers, instructing the girls to select one of their graphs and align the bottom musical line with their graph’s X-axis., Next, the students transposed their graph points into music notes on their sheet music. With their songs written, they used iPads to pull up a website called Flat.io. The girls were able to hear their newly composed music with a simulated piano version of their work created by the site’s software.
In their next class, the students moved from quantitative, numerical data and acoustical art to qualitative, categorical data and visual art. In this lesson, they discovered pictorial graphs and discussed how abstracting data in this visual manner can help make it more accessible and comprehensible for a broader audience. Inspired by the book “Dear Data,” written by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, two mathematicians and friends, Ms. Vardis challenged her students to make graphs that look nothing like what would be expected. In their book, the two friends wrote postcards to each other once a week for a year. On each postcard they would create a new pictorial graph to share updates about their lives. These graphs changed each week and looked more like tiny works of art than traditional graphs. Ms. Vardis showed the girls one she had been inspired to make that detailed the kinds of food she ate over the course of a week. It was full of swirling lines, teardrop-like symbols and other small, abstract shapes. As the students dug into the meaning behind each artistic choice, the data was revealed.
Breaking off on their own, each student began designing her own postcard graph. Once finished, the girls were tasked with “mailing” their cards to another student in the class. With this fun lesson completed, Ms. Vardis displayed each student’s mathematical art in the hallway outside her classroom and the hallway outside Gordon Room, sharing her students’ creativity with the rest of the Chapin community.
