Campus Community
Posted: Thursday, August 20, 2009Focus on College and Community Partnerships: David Wilson
A one-of-a-kind gazebo will soon be taking shape on 18th Street, thanks to a College and Community Partnership Grant awarded to the Mathematics Department, which will partner with Making Fishers of Men and Women, a faith-based neighborhood group.
Preservice math teachers are working with middle- and high-school students who will develop math skills and help West Side youth employed in the Summer Youth Employment Program build the gazebo. Michael Brundige, construction project specialist and director of Making Fishers of Men and Women, is overseeing the project with David Wilson, chair and associate professor of mathematics.
“We were going to make the gazebo from a kit,” said Wilson, “but then Paul Kinney, an architect with Young + Wright Architectural, volunteered his services to design a shelter that would fit in better with existing structures in the neighborhood.”
The structure’s unique design also extends the teaching and learning opportunities of the project, titled “Building for Understanding.”
“Construction uses a lot of math,” said Wilson. “For example, a property of rectangles is that its diagonals are equal. That’s how carpenters determine that corners are square.”
Crystal Sailor, ’03, a math major working on her teaching certification, and Jason Robinson, an undergraduate math education major, are using the building’s design drawings to help students understand math principles. Wilson said, “By seeing how math applies to real life, we hope to help the students understand concepts like ratio and proportion, geometry, and trigonometry. They will also have an opportunity to use them to solve real-life problems.”
Before the digging starts, Sailor and Robinson will help the students determine the dimensions of the necessary materials and guide them through building a scale model.
Thanks to assistance from the Undergraduate Research Office, Sailor and Robinson are documenting the project for presentation at the 2010 Undergraduate Research and Creativity Celebration and receiving a stipend for their work.
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