Math Dancing

Can you dance math? Sure!

In fact, adding movement and music to math enhances the learning.

I saw Paula Harris, school board member and engineer, speak at an AAUW Expanding Your Horizons event recently. She commented that her daughter wanted to be a dancer – despite Paula’s math influences on her from an early age.

I couldn’t get my hand in the air fast enough to share Malke Rosenfeld’s Math in Your Feet program.

There are other dancing and math resources too.

I was wowed at what I found when I did an online search on math dancing.

The most amazing and inspiring was this TEDx talk from Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern of Math Dance:

Research has been done…

Here are two research articles on math dancing, each from prominent math professional organizations (they require purchase but you can read the first bits):

Dancing Mathematics and the Mathematics of Dance in the Mathematical Association of America’s journal.
Do the Math Dance: Mathematicians and Choreographers Use Dance to Teach Mathematics in the American Mathematical Society’s journal.

Programs are available!

Here are two I found that look really neat:

Malke Rosenfeld’s Math in Your Feet offers classes, student residencies and teacher workshops on math and movement.
Martha Connerton’s Kinetic Works has movement videos and classes for math as well as other subjects.

Unfortunately all the information on Math Dance workshops and performances by Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern are outdated. I’ll shoot them an email to see if they’re still available.

You can create your own.

It might take some effort, but you can do it. Watch the videos samples of these professional math dancers. They’ll give you good ideas to use with your kids.

I’ll also try to come up with some. I’m excited about what I’ve found – my wheels are turning.

Get your groove on and give it a try – go do some math dancing!

(Oh – and don’t forget to share your experiences in the comments. Leave a link to a video if you get a chance to record it!)