Math Madness Summary

The article Math Madness: Coloring, Reasoning, and Celebrating, discusses how important it is to include math activities that are challenging, but also fun in the classroom. The article was written by Nicholas Wasswerman and is based on what he saw in his daughter’s classroom. He noticed that the school had publishing parties and other elaborate projects for certain subjects but lacked “anything remotely comparable in mathematics” (Wasserman 469). This is when he decided to step in and Math Madness was created. The article first discusses how Wasswerman and his daughter’s teacher went about making the criteria for math madness. They knew that they wanted it to be a project that lasted for several days and that resulted in a product that parents could interact with and explore. However, they also wanted the project to be enjoyable and to include some math topics that the students had already learned about. They finally landed on creating Math Madness-a project that would
However, if two vertices of the shape were joined by an edge, they could not be the same color. After explaining what the task was, the article delves into how the task was split up into chunks. On day 1, students were put into groups and challenged to color a graph using fewer colors than their neighbor did. This strategy served to get the students engaged in the lesson, as they were now focused on the material since they wanted to beat their friends. Students practiced coloring circuit graphs, wheel graphs, complete graphs, as well as some “challenge” graphs. Due to the way the activity was set up, the students quickly understood what was expected of them and were soon performing a difficult math concept with ease. This happened so easily, as the students were engaged with one another and were having fun working on the