As I watched Nick Sayers’ talk, I found myself stopping a few times to scribble notes and just sit with certain ideas. His projects feel playful and inventive on the surface, but the more he explained his thinking, the more I realized how intentional and layered they are.
Stop 1 – 13:00
Around the 13-minute mark, I was struck by how Nick talks about mathematics and science as the mediums he uses to communicate bigger ideas - political, environmental, and social issues. Math isn’t the end point in his work; it’s the language he uses to tell a story. That immediately connected me back to our class discussions about teaching math for social and ecological justice. He’s not separating math from the world, he’s using scale, measurement, systems, and modelling to surface questions about sustainability, power, and impact. It reminded me of when we looked at redlining maps and how mathematical tools (mapping, data, scale) can expose inequities. His work feels like a lived example of math not as neutral, but as a way of making issues visible and tangible.
Stop 2 – 40:00
Around the 40-minute mark, when he starts talking about using bikes to create spirographs, I stopped again. What really caught me was that the patterns aren’t just about speed or rotation, they involve prime numbers. That immediately reinforced the idea of primes as the building blocks of numbers. I’ve done a “City of Primes” lesson before and I love how it elevates prime numbers and their importance in structure and pattern. Seeing primes show up in something as visual and dynamic as a giant bike-powered spirograph just makes that idea feel even more alive.
I also love spirographs in general, they fascinate kids (and honestly, me too. I never had one as a kid, so I made sure my kids had one and I probably played with it more than they did). The combination of bikes, gears, ratios, rotation, and pattern crosses beautifully into science with simple machines and proportional reasoning. It feels like such a natural STEAM connection. I would absolutely love to see a STEAM class try to recreate something like this or even a smaller-scale version of his sketchograph machine. Something where students physically build, test, adjust, and see the mathematics emerge through motion.
Stop 3 – 1:00:00
Around the one-hour mark, when he described Cycle the Solar System, I immediately started thinking about how powerful that would be in a Grade 6 classroom. Those massive space numbers are so hard for students to comprehend when they’re just written on the board. Scaling the solar system and physically travelling the distances makes it embodied, you feel the vastness instead of just hearing it. I could see this mixing beautifully with rate, ratios, proportions, percentages, and getting students outside and moving. It’s such a concrete way to make abstract scale meaningful.
It also connected to something I was doing just this Friday. I was working with a school and their Aboriginal Education worker using the large 11 m by 8 m Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada floor map. We were looking at how some Indigenous groups were displaced from their homelands and talking about potential math lessons using the map’s scale. We discussed tracking and measuring Chanie Wenjack’s journey - or at least how far he would have needed to travel to get home - and there are also arrows on the map showing forced relocations over distance. It struck me how similar this is to Nick’s solar system project: using scale and movement to help students understand distance in a way that carries emotional and historical weight, not just numerical magnitude.
What Nick Sayers’ work offers me
Nick’s work deepens my understanding of math-art connections by showing that mathematics doesn’t have to sit quietly behind the scenes. It can be visible, kinetic, public, and participatory. Math becomes something you ride, walk, draw, build, and experience. As a math teacher, this reminds me that conceptual understanding often strengthens when students feel scale, pattern, ratio, or structure in their bodies, not just on paper.
More than anything, I feel like his process gives permission to just try things - to build, test, adjust, and figure things out as you go. It shows that math can help tell important stories and that STEAM learning doesn’t need to be fancy or expensive. It really just takes curiosity, some risk-taking, and a willingness to let math move off the page and into real experiences.
I was also struck by how Nick used math as a tool for creating his art. He doesn't need to understand everything about math, but he is able to use his understanding to create something beautiful.
ReplyDeleteAt my son's school they did a space project where they created a scale model of the solar system and then made the school the sun and figured out how far away all the planets would be. Neptune was a few blocks away! Parents were invited to tour the model and it delighted my son to show off how far away things were.
I am wondering if I couldn't do something similar with my Chemistry 11 class for atomic structure. It is so very abstract and the scale is impossible to understand. But I agree with you that physically experiencing the scale is a powerful way to learn. Much more meaningful than writing the numbers on the board (my current approach).
Nicole, I was really drawn to your reflections on labyrinths as purposeful, reflective journeys rather than puzzles to be solved. That idea of a single winding path, not a maze with dead ends, connects deeply to how I’ve been thinking about braiding and algorithmic processes. In both cases, structure doesn’t restrict experience; it holds it. Your connection to math fear and learner choice also resonated with me. When students enter mathematics through something meaningful, whether a labyrinth, clay, or sweetgrass, the work becomes less about performance and more about relationships.
ReplyDeleteI was especially impressed by your wondering about what we lose when material engagement disappears from schools. In my own reflections, I’ve been thinking about fabrication tools and embodied making as extensions of thinking, not distractions from it. Your post reinforces that mathematical understanding isn’t just symbolic, it’s spatial, tactile, affective, and institutional. It makes me wonder what rhythms we might need to slow down to truly see that.