Math Lab
To take students through a stimulating process of mathematical thinking, and make them passionate learners and lovers of mathematics: a dedicated room of interactives, puzzles, games and books, built on your curriculum and kept in use.
What is a Math Lab?
A space to freely explore, investigate and create. A Math Lab is a dedicated room where mathematics is met through tangible interactives that spark interesting problem solving, a collection of mathematical games, a collection of classical puzzles and a maths library. It is built on your curriculum, and it comes with the activity lesson plans, the facilitator support and the follow-up visits that keep it in use through the year. Grades 1 to 10 can use the same space with different activity plans.
Many children decide early that mathematics is not for them, and they decide it on the evidence of a page. In the lab the same ideas are things a child can pick up, tilt, balance and get wrong, and being unsure is the normal state. The lab is for every child, not only for those who already like maths.
"Mathematics has beauty and romance. It's not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It's an extraordinary place; it's worth spending time there."
How it works
The lab holds five kinds of thing, and the building around it is used as a sixth. Every material comes with learning triggers rather than instructions.
Maths interactives
Linking cubes and 3D nets, dice, a magnetic board with tangram pieces, counters. Groups work at them together.
Classical puzzles
The 15 puzzle, Tower of Hanoi, Brainvita, pentomino, Puzzle-a-Day. Each one is a small piece of mathematics a child can hold, try and try again.
Strategy games
Prime Climb, Game of Hex, Pallanguzhi, Connect 4. Recreational maths, where reasoning and anticipation grow through play.
Maths library
Maths treasures, charts and posters, magazines and newsletters, puzzle books. A reading space alongside promotes the reading of maths books.
Life-sized installations
A magnetic wall with about 2,000 magnetic-tipped foam shapes for polygons, puzzles and art exhibits; a pegged geoboard wall for area, perimeter and Hamiltonian paths; a gear wall for simple machines; a lever balance for torque and equilibrium. These go along the corridor outside the lab.
Building as a learning aid
A snake and ladder grid and a chessboard on the floor. The building itself becomes a place to play with mathematics, and it costs nothing in timetable.
The space is run by a facilitator. We help the school hire that person and then mentor them, and we facilitate student sessions ourselves on our visits, so that the lab is a working room from its first week.
What your school receives
Seed2Sapling provides
- Conceptualising the space, planning interiors, design and set-up services, with the materials packed and delivered
- 30 to 45 maths interactives, enough to engage 40 students working in groups
- Maths puzzles, strategy games and a maths library with posters, books and library materials
- Life-sized maths installations: magnetic gear wall, geoboard wall, lever balance
- Building-as-a-learning-aid elements: floor snakes and ladders, floor chessboard
- 80 to 100 activity lesson plans across age groups, with material-wise teacher resources and activity booklets
- Learning triggers: handouts with questions and outlines to trigger creativity, starting ideas and directions, and the pedagogy to promote originality and design thinking
- Facilitator hiring, mentoring and support
- After set-up: ideas for engaging students with each of the materials, facilitation of student sessions, and weekly monitoring of the space with the facilitator to discuss progress
- 4 to 5 follow-up visits a year to facilitate and observe student sessions
- Transportation and installation
The school provides
- Interiors execution and furniture, including stickering
- Electrician work
- Computers or laptops, with the hardware and software they need
- Projector and projector screen
- Soft boards and white boards
- Consumables and maintenance of the equipment after installation
- A facilitator to run the space, whom we help you find
We will also suggest our ideas for all of the above.
Putting it in place
Scope varies with the size of the room and how many installations you take, and it is agreed before anything else. Follow-up can be structured as physical visits, online grade-band sessions, or a mix.
Many schools grow the lab into teacher-led maths clubs. During each visit we run a session with the maths teachers on experiencing the pedagogy themselves, then facilitate three to four student sessions in the lab, with teachers observing and co-facilitating. For each material we share four to six ideas per grade, and we meet regularly to reflect on what happened in the room. Under focus in these sessions: the art of observation and questioning, inquiry-based learning, adapting curriculum activities to shift the focus onto skills, mathematical thinking and differentiated learning strategies. Block-period sessions are facilitated by us first and by the school's teachers later. A lighter start is possible too: five or six different materials in sets of twenty, usable for many activities across grades, with the same teacher sessions around them.
The teacher sessions are Dialogue on Learning in a maths room. For schools that want the whole of it, the Math Lab and its clubs become part of Learn2Learn.
From the classroom
"I used to think Mathematics is only a conceptual and technical subject, but now I feel it can also be taught through games and play rather than only through books."
Let's talk about what your school needs
Partner with usAlso worth looking at: Exploratory materials and kits · Tinker Den · Life-sized installations