Maths in Museums
This is me, grinning my face off because the Learning team at Bletchley Park had just won “Best Venue for Maths Learning” at the School Travel Awards for the third year in a row.
The following year the category didn’t even exist any more. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is because there wasn’t enough competition to make it a fair fight.
Don’t get me wrong: we won it largely because we had an amazing general learning programme of which that mathematics angle was particularly strong.
But…
Mathematics is something that a lot of museums shy away from. That, I think, is partly down to the (completely unwarranted) negative view of mathematics that seems to pervade our society. But do you know what? The maths activities that I’ve presented to people – in schools, at public talks and even, no word of a lie, at Butlin’s – have always gone down a storm.
Q: How do I make maths fun?
I don’t!
It already is fun!
I just work hard to show people what I see in it.
It’s also down to something that I’ve come across time and time again when bringing up the M-word with museum professionals:
“… but there’s no maths in our story!”
Every single museum or heritage site’s story has mathematics in it.
It’s more obvious in some stories than others, but it is always there.
Some other things that heritage professionals say about maths in their museum:
“No, really, we have no maths in our story! I’ve looked!”
Honestly, it’s there. I can help you find it.
You’re probably already featuring a little bit of maths in some of your Learning activities.
Sometimes it’s just a case of drawing attention to it.
“We already do maths sessions!”
Brilliant! I’d love to hear about it and help to get the word out there: please get in touch!
But…
… most of the activities labelled “maths” that I’ve seen in museums would actually be better labelled as “numeracy”: practising calculation only scratches the surface of what’s possible.
There’s much more to your story than that.
“But why bother?”
- Grow your Learning audiences: Struggling to attract secondary schools? It’s not because they don’t want trips: they have to release students from core subject lessons – such as maths – in order to do so, so they want visits that have relevance to those subjects.
- Expand your general audiences: There are a lot of maths fans out there, and very little in the museum world that encourages us to explore it.
- Contribute to the improvement of attitudes towards mathematics in the communities you engage with: many museums aim to have a positive effect on their local communities, and mathematical attainment correlates with higher scores in various quality-of-life indices.
“But maths teachers don’t organise school trips to museums!”
Yes they do; they just give up looking pretty quickly because there’s not much out there for them.
Add some curriculum-linked, cross-curricular, mathematically engaging content and you’ll have a product aimed at an audience desperate for it, and very little competition.
How can I help?
I can:
- Help you to find the maths in your story if you haven’t discovered it already
- Develop engaging resources, activities, or workshops based on the topics that we find
- Train your session leaders to deliver the sessions
- Provide professional development for your staff to properly understand the topics covered