Learning math by painting parabolas

When my algebra II teacher told the class that we were going outside to paint the following day, students were shocked but excited to come to class the next day. My teacher explained that we were going to do math, but instead of with a pencil, our fingers would be the  writing utensil.

“It teaches students a tactile way of learning,” said algebra teacher Ashley Smith.

Before we proceeded to leave the classroom, my teacher taught us the basics of parabolas. We learned tricks for sketching a decent parabola. We utilized the equation to find out necessary points such as roots and the axis of symmetry to draw the parabola.

As if going out in the fresh air rather than being in our usually stuffy classroom wasn’t good enough, we grabbed seats at tables with bowls of fresh paint. This excited many students, considering that most of us hadn’t finger painted since kindergarten.

Before we knew it, we were recalling the short lesson about parabolas that our teacher had taught, and we had the pleasure of drawing parabolas of all colors on our handmade graphs.

After correctly locating critical points and drawing the parabola, on a separate sheet of paper we got the pleasure of using our creativity to draw parabola related images. Many students drew lines forming a recognizable rainbow, others drew more complicated images of things like  bridges and flowers.

Painting parabolas was the most refreshing experience I’ve ever had in any math class I’ve taken in years. I’m also sure that no one minded the paint left on our fingertips as a reminder of what we’d learned.