Etwinning

Fermat's room

Inspired by the film of the same name, Spanish teachers Francisco Javier Martín and José María Gallego, and Romanian teachers Lucia Dorina Gutu and Marzanna Miąsko have started an ambitious project to challenge their students and awaken their mathematical intuition.

The plot is about a group of mathematicians equipped with PDAs who are appointed at a mysterious farm. They are enclosed in a luxurious room and they start to receive jigsaws and riddles to their phone. But if they take longer than a minute to solve a  puzzle... the room shrinks! The walls move and make it smaller.

Teachers started to compile and pose riddles at different levels of difficulty, inspired in the film, but the project is much more ambitious: building the room. When it came to designing the model, students got in touch with Luís Piedrahita, one of the film directors, in order to reveal some of the keys of the system.

This project was one of the six selected by the MediaLab-Prado in Madrid to be included in the interactive exhibition Playing with numbers. Javier and José María are now describing their project:

They already have a preliminary version of the videogame (you must have installed Geogebra) and a model of the room connected to the computer and controlled by an Arduin plaque. But they need collaborators and partners: programmers and technology, maths, physics and electronics teachers... Would you like to take part? Any contributions made to the catalogue of games and riddles are also welcome. You can get in touch with them through the Desktop or their blog.

Links

Project site (English and Polish): http://class.vel.pl/room

Project blog (English): http://fermatroom.blogspot.com/

Online videogame (you must have installed Geogebra): http://instrumentales.webcindario.com/jmelis-web/fermat.html

Playing with numbers, an exhibition at MediaLab Prado: http://medialab-prado.es/article/jugando_con_numeros_proyectos_seleccionados