HeArtful Maths

A selection of creative Valentine's Day maths activities.

Easy origami heart

This is a straightforward fold that makes a really neat little paper heart. Either print out these instructions from www.supercoloring.com and let your students tackle it independently, or use one of the many videos on Youtube.  This one is particularly clearly demonstrated.

Students can open up their hearts and write messages on the inside.  Alternatively you can spread the love around by doing some 'origami bombing'.  This goes down a treat!

A nice extension to this activity is to ask students to find the area of their heart as a proportion of the original square it was folded from.

Drawing a Cardioid

This lesson is featured on my Mathematical Art Lessons page.  It is a 'curve stitching' style lesson that looks at the occurrence of these intriguing functions in the world around us and introduces the idea of modulo arithmetic. Credit and thanks are due to K Rybarczyk of Knightswood Secondary School for the printable 60 point circle templates.

​Resources provided: a presentation which introduces the cardioid, shows examples in different contexts, and demonstrates the drawing procedure; printable template. Resources needed: pencils, rulers, erasers, coloured pencils or pens (optional).

Plotting parametric hearts

Older students can practise plotting parametric or polar functions to produce a heart-shaped graph.  This can then be cut out and stuck onto card to make a truly geeky Valentine's card :) There is a good selection to choose from on Wolfram Mathworld and some alternatives at Owlcation.  And this one from 9gag uses the modulus function:

Slotted paper heart globe

Martin Holtham (@GHSMaths) introduced me to this lovely 'paper heart globe' icosahedron-type construction from www.extremepapercrafting.com (what a great name for a website!), originally shared by John Golden (@mathhombre) on Twitter. Full step-by-step instructions and a printable template are available on the website, along with a link to the following assembly video by @dutchpapergirl:

Happy Valentine's Day!