Red Hook Art Project

Annie: During STEM & Stitches workshops at the Red Hook Art Project in Brooklyn, students crocheted a hyperbolic plane pattern. As they increased every stitch, they could experience exponential growth tactilely. After students mathematically modeled the number of stitches they crocheted in each round, I encouraged some of them to make a graph showing increasingly steep lines connecting between dots, before formally introducing them to exponential growth and other math concepts. The students were also taught how to make conjectures about different scenarios–with varying rates of increases–and evaluate their conjectures using examples and counterexamples. During another lesson on the connection between math and crochet, the students–as young as 4th-graders–were able to ask and answer questions about the behavior of straight lines in different geometric worlds. At the end, a girl commented, "this is more fun than my math class at school!”