Image of the Week: Making Sense by Noticing and Wondering

Making Sense by Noticing and Wondering

This week’s image is of Kukulkan Pyramid in Chichen Itza, Mexico, on the of the great ancient architectural sites of the world. Most likely, a structure like this is outside of your students’ everyday experience, and it requires that we make sense of it with noticing and wondering as a key tool. Students might notice:

• It looks like a pyramid made of steps.
• There are two kinds of steps: small ones in the middle and big ones at the corners.
• It’s tall! Look how small the people are!
• Some parts look new and other parts are crumbling.
• There are stones on the outside in patterns.
• The rectangles of stones are wider on the bottom and narrower toward the top.
• The base looks like a square. The left and right look like they used to be the same.
• It looks like it is made of layers of squares, each one a little smaller than the last.

They might wonder:

• How big is that, anyway? How could we figure it out?
• How long would it take you to climb?
• Is it really a pyramid? What do the other sides look like? Are they the same as the sides we can see?
• How big is the base? How big is each layer?
• How tall are the big steps?
• How many stones are there on the outside?
• How long did it take to build? How many people were involved?

As with all noticing and wondering, we can’t answer all of these questions with the image alone. But each of these questions is mathematical and worthy of exploration, either with this image or by learning more about Chichen Itza from other sources. And most importantly, what students are practicing here is looking at the world through a mathematical lens. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we are getting ready to send our students off into the world for the summer. Take this opportunity to set them up to see their world mathematically, whether they are in the woods, at a library, or someplace wildly new, like Chichen Itza.

And we invite you to follow us on Twitter! Tweet us the fascinating ideas you students have about our activities or how you’re trying these activities in your space. We can’t wait to hear from you!

To multiplicity, cheers!

Jen Munson and the multiplicity lab group