Math goggles: Moebius jewelry and 19th-century animation machines

Math Goggles help you notice math everywhere. Thank you, Katrina Mills and STEMcrafted (J.E. Johnson) – you notice beautiful math on Pinterest!

If your kids don’t work with gold and silver as the sculptor Ilana Krepchin, you can still make Moebius strip jewelry out of fabric, polymer clay, or thick paper. Cover the strip with paint or polish to make it sturdy and pretty. Glue on a marble. It invokes the amazing property of the Moebius strip’s topology: your marble could roll around and around the single side!

Calculus is like animation: it captures infinitesimal instances of change and movement as snapshots! Invite your kids to animate like it’s 1830s. It takes just a few minutes to make a flipbook, a zoetrope, or a phenakistoscope. The hardest to pronounce is the easiest to make.