Exit Slip: Eco Art and Math Classrooms

As you can infer from my obsessive rope making during class with the day lily leaves, I loved that activity the most. Rope making, knot tying, and the like has always fascinated me, but I've never seen it tied in to any 'class' except for outdoor wilderness survival days or in sailing. Those two 'classes' were never consistently available to me, and so I'd love to bring rope making into the conventional classroom to both expose students to the trade and to the math in the art.

In particular, I'd love to examine the property of loop angles and the connection to strength. I think it'd be a good activity/project for students to make different ropes at different angles and then test out the strengths. They could then all work together to try to figure out exactly why the angle matters for strength, and then find the ideal angle (which, I believe Susan said was around 38-42 degrees).

Once you make rope, I think it'd be really natural to segue into knot tying and knot theory, and talk about patterns and loops and crossovers, and how that leads to different types of knots (ones that move, ones that come free with one tug, ones that are very secure, etc.).