On a mission to show that math doesn’t always have to be intimidating and that “no one is bad at math,” a Roosevelt math teacher found a way to organically bring graphic design into the classroom, giving students a chance to unleash their creativity.
Margaret Navolio, eighth grade math teacher at Roosevelt Middle School, was teaching math standards last year to her students, showing them how to create graphs of lines and restricting the range and domain when the idea came to her: Make it a picture.
After flushing out the idea and creating parameters to help students, Navolio had her students create an original design using concepts they learned in their accelerated math class, who are taking algebra one.
The results of the “Desmos Art Project” were astonishing.
“They made it super cool and they really ran with it,” Navolio said. “The designs became more amazing than I really intended. I thought they would all make a house.”
While some students did make more conservative designs, others took the opportunity to intersect graphic art and math to create something really great.
The designs were formed in various ways, said Navolio, and sometimes that called for trial and error.
Ben Goldstein, eighth grader, decided to recreate the cover of the book he has been carrying around for the last six months, “The Source,” by James A. Michener.
“My favorite part was definitely making some of the lines,” he said. “I had to use some equations that I had to fiddle around with to figure out. The most challenging part was definitely making the letters precise.”
Getting all the letters to be even and up to his standards — the whole project took him about four hours over the course of a few days.
“I was contemplating other designs but I felt like this was unique, making a book cover that I’m sure [ not a lot of people] have coming around the school.”
But even when trial and error were being used, Navolio said her students successfully manipulated the equations, which served as the learning process and led them to understand the concepts she was teaching.
As part of the end of the chapter assessment, Navolio said students were already accumulating the skills they needed to successfully complete the project and score well on the test.
Navolio said students completed various designs including an elephant, Christmas trees and race cars.
“Some kids thought ‘what is something I can attainably make myself,’ and they thought more from the math side of it and other kids were more like ‘I want to make this really cool, awesome picture,’ and they thought visualized that and did their best to execute that,” Navolio said.
Inspired by her trip to Paris during her summer break, Isa Li designed the Eiffel Tower.
“We got to go up the Eiffel Tower and I just thought it was really cool,” Li said. “It [ the project] was a little bit challenging because it was repetitive and I had to make a lot of lines.”
Lillian Rowe, an eighth grader, designed an eye that was inspired by a popular design circulating on Pinterest. Inspired by art that depicts the human body, Rowe, who loves sketching her art, said that while the project was tedious and took a lot of time, she learned a lot about how to manipulate equations to get her desired outcome.
“I had some swoops, which are definitely harder to make, and if you didn’t do the whole equation in one go, you would have to restart it,” Rowe said. “It was a new unique concept that I am not really used to. It was a new way to approach art.”
Bringing graphic design into a math classroom, Navolio said she saw students who are often doodling in their notebooks have a chance to be creative.
“It was a chance to express that in math, which you don’t always get as much of an opportunity as in the humanities courses,” she said.
Navolio called the project “a bringing in” moment for those students.
Navolio also upped the stakes by creating a classroom competition, where she sent out the top voted on designs from her class to other teachers for voting and the top three students won a free lunch.
“It always gets a couple more people super motivated because they want to have the top project in their class,” she said.
Always trying to make math engaging and fun, Navolio said these types of projects allow for math to be viewed as engaging and fun.
“It doesn’t always have to be scary and intimidating,” she said. “There can be ways to make it more enjoyable and ways to make it more accessible to everyone because I like when a project like this has an entry point for everyone but also a really far extension that kids can choose to challenge themselves if they like.”