Day 1 of Magically Miraculous Math was a time for everyone to get to know one another. We did a few icebreakers – one of which was math oriented. Below, see a video of the classes doing a human knot. Many places use this as a group building exercise. I used it to demonstrate an area of mathematics known as knot theory. Many times, students are able to create the unknot (The unknot, also called the trivial knot, is a closed loop that is not knotted [Weisstein, Eric W. “Unknot.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Unknot.html].). You can see a partial knot table at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/CS285/IMGS/knot-table.jpg.
I am excited to see everything these students are capable of learning during the next two weeks.