Years ago, when my daughters were 6 and 9, we went to the MIT Museum on a day when the place was quite deserted. We wandered around the museum, looking and musing (which is, after all, what museums are for, right?) until we happened on to a small but magical room called MathSpace. The MathSpace was full of geometric manipulatives: pattern blocks, Pentablocks®, Polydron Frameworks®, and Zometools®. The two girls sat down and immediately started building stuff--they were hooked, and spent the whole rest of the afternoon in that one small room of the museum. They had to throw us out at closing time.
When we got back to our home in Upstate New York, I started looking for sources of those simple but fascinating objects that had so entranced and engaged my daughters, and gradually over the years, we acquired more and more pieces for birthday and holiday presents. Ultimately our dining room became something of a family mathspace museum itself!
Our family's collection of geometric manipulatives must have ultimately cost hundreds of dollars, but it wound up working to pennies per child hour of fascination, since not only our own two daughters but many other children have used our manipulatives in our volunteer work with various groups of children.
But it never would have occurred to me to buy them in the first place if it hadn't been for that fateful serendipitous encounter in the MathSpace room at the MIT Museum.
Unfortunately, the MIT Museum no longer has a MathSpace room or any place where kids can discover and play with geometric manipulatives. My dream is that some day every inner-city neighborhood will have a storefront "MathSpace" where children and adults can drop in and build things together. It would be full of geometric manipulatives and perhaps some posters on the wall and maybe some models hanging from the ceiling for inspiration. I imagine retired scientists and engineers, college students, and other adults with flexible schedules hanging out there, not teaching but just building their own cool stuff and admiring and perhaps talking about the cool stuff the kids build. When someone builds something especially cool, perhaps a photo could be taken and posted on the wall and/or uploaded to a computer slide-show.
It wouldn't be very expensive to open a bunch of these all over the country. There are plenty of empty storefronts so rents shouldn't be too high. Perhaps the owner of a small strip mall might decide that turning one of his empty storefronts into a MathSpace would draw more customers to the other businesses there. There would be some up-front costs for materials, but they are quite sturdy and durable. The manufacturers might even be willing to donate some of it, since it could be considered a promotional expense (free advertising) as well as a community service. If the storefront MathSpaces were run by 501(c)3 charitable organizations, there could be tax writeoffs for donations by community members who contributed. There would be concerns about choking hazards, so small children would have to be kept out, and someone would probably have to be hired to supervise, and there are issues of liability insurance, etc. Maybe that why MIT doesn't have their MathSpace room any more. (MIT replaced their MathSpace with something they called Thinkapalooza.)
But, one can dream....
What inspired me to write this post today, was reading the obituary of noted mathematician David Gale, who died earlier this year. It turns out that he also dreamed of math museums as well:
About 30 years ago, Gale became convinced that the world needed a hands-on math museum, and he constructed at home some of his own rudimentary exhibits and puzzles out of bicycle chains, rubber and wood to demonstrate principles of mathematics and geometry, Katharine Gale said.
Although he eventually dropped the museum idea, saying it was too large an undertaking, David Gale developed an equivalent on the Internet in 2003 with $40,000 from the Sloan Foundation. MathSite (http://mathsite.math.berkeley.edu/), which he promoted as "an interactive source for seeing, hearing, doing mathematics," received the 2007 Pirelli International Award for multimedia communication of mathematics, beating out several well-funded competitors, according to Gale's longtime partner, Sandra M. Gilbert, a feminist poet and professor emerita of English at UC Davis
David Gale's on-line math museum provides some opportunities for geometric exploration and discovery, but it also provides great opportunities to explore the mathematics of game theory in a playful way. (Game theory was one of David Gale's specialties, by the way. John Nash--of A Beautiful Mind--was one of his students.)
David Gale's on-line museum is a remarkable legacy, freely available to anyone of any age anywhere in the world with access to the Internet. It's an example of incredibly cool stuff done on a shoestring. Definitely worth checking out!
