Bette Maggie Sloane, Mineola High School, Garden City Park, NY
Capturing the Artistic Sides of Geometry and Algebra

The NEA Foundation created its Challenge to Innovate (C2i) to discover innovative approaches in teaching and to enable educators to share and build on these ideas to improve student learning. Find out how C2i Mobile Project national awardee Bette Maggie Sloane, is using mobile phone technology to change the way her students learn.

Bette Maggie Sloane knows firsthand the joys of an interdisciplinary approach to education. With a BFA in Photography and a MA in Mathematics Education, she is a living example of a right-brained/left-brained education. So when it came to the task of getting her high school students excited about math, she drew on her love of photography.

Because she believes that students learn best by doing, she challenged her class to find applications of the geometry and algebra concepts they learned in school in the world around them.

A field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a library research project provided her students with an overview of the artistic uses and implications of geometric transformations. She told her students to find parallel and perpendicular lines in their daily lives and to document them with their cell phone cameras. They emailed photos to her and she posted them on her faculty website, creating an interactive, digital museum.

“This is a way for students to use a feature of their phones to document math. Instead of texting or emailing, which can be a quick and even forgettable interaction, students can keep their photographs in their phone files to look at in the future,” she says. “By sending me their submissions, digitally, the art they created with their phone can be exhibited on my website. Most students don't think that their phones are capable of creating art...but they are!”

The entire project, start to finish, is digital. “Students have their cell phones with them all the time; this idea turns their phones into instructional tools!”