Playful Math Carnival

The Playful Math Carnival (formerly “Math Teachers at Play”) is a monthly collection of mathy fun: tips, tidbits, games, activities, and more.

It’s like a free online magazine of mathematical adventures for teachers, parents, and students in preschool through high school. If you like to learn new things and play around with ideas, you are sure to find something of interest.

Visit the Current Carnival

[CREDITS: All images in this post are licensed by Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0) via Flickr.]

We normally schedule the Playful Math Carnival for the last week of each month, with the exact day of publication left to the host’s discretion.

• Current edition: Playful Math Carnival 171 at Let’s Play Math
• April 2024: Carnival 172 at Let’s Play Math
• May 2024: Carnival 173 at Nature Study Australia
• June/July 2024: Carnival 174 at Math Mama Writes
• August 2024: Carnival 175 at …
• September 2024: Carnival 176 at …
• October 2024: Carnival 177 at …
• November/December 2024: Carnival 178 at …
• Pick a month you’d like to host. We need volunteers!

Recent Editions:

• Playful Math Carnival 170 at Let’s Play Math
• Playful Math Carnival 169 at Math Hombre
• Playful Math Carnival 168 at Find the Factors
• Playful Math Carnival 167 at Learning Well at Home
• Playful Math Carnival 166 at Math Mama Writes
• Browse all the past editions of the Playful Math Carnival on Pinterest or by scrolling backward down my blog.

Would You Like to Host the Carnival?

The carnival is a joint effort. We need more volunteers.

Classroom teachers, homeschoolers, college professors, unschoolers, or anyone who likes to play around with math — if you would like to take a turn hosting the carnival, please speak up!

How to host a carnival, in Six Easy Steps …

Step 1: Get Signed Up

Check the list of the upcoming editions above. If a future month isn’t listed, assume it’s free. Choose an open date that fits your schedule.

Please email me directly to let me know your choice. Or leave a comment below this article.

Step 2: Receive Submissions

Post a “Call for Submissions” request on your own blog and social media accounts a week or two before your carnival, so readers can submit entries directly to you.

We welcome entries from parents, students, teachers, homeschoolers, and just plain folks. Posts must offer a playful approach to some topic in school-level mathematics (that is, anything from preschool up through first-year calculus) or recreational math. Old posts are welcome, as long as they haven’t been published in recent editions of this carnival.

Don’t rely on submissions, though, because you may not get anything worth using.

You’ll need to fill out the carnival with favorite links from your recent online browsing. In the months when I’m hosting, I start a folder on my bookmarks bar to collect goodies for my carnival.

Step 3: Sort Out the Spam

Keep in mind Dan Meyer’s warning, Stop Linking To “Top 100 Blogs” Lists.

Even if a submission is not spammy, you do NOT have to include it in your carnival post if you don’t want to. Sometimes people submit posts that feel too commercial, or that just don’t fit the “playful math” theme.

The carnival is a guest on your blog, but you are still in charge. Don’t feel obligated to post anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Step 4: Write Your Post

You decide how much effort you want to put in. Writing the carnival can take a couple of hours for a simple post, or you can spend several days searching out and polishing playful math gems to share.

I try to start writing a draft of my carnival post long before my deadline. I collect pictures (good advice on finding pictures here) and quotations whenever I find something I like, and enter them into my post ahead of time. If I have the framework in place, then all I have to add at the last minute are the article links, and the job doesn’t seem overwhelming.

Make sure you have the right to use any image you post. Either create a graphic yourself or find something marked “Creative Commons” — and then follow the CC rules and give credit to the artist/photographer.

Step 5: Add Something Extra

We don’t have a fixed pattern for what a carnival post should look like.

Our partner carnival, the Carnival of Mathematics, traditionally begins with trivia about the carnival number, and many Playful Math Education hosts have followed in their footsteps. Others have introduced their carnivals with riddles or puzzles about the carnival number. (See, for example, Carnival #20.)

If you’re feeling truly creative, you can even try a themed carnival, like the Women of Mathematics Carnival (#115).

Somewhere within your post, it’s nice to add a link to the current edition of the Carnival of Mathematics. They in turn should link back to your post — or rather, the next edition of the carnival should do so, if they remember. In this way, we help support each other.

Step 6: Time To Publish

Putting together a carnival can be a lot of work, but I hope you will enjoy “meeting” new friends through the articles you find. I love that part of being a host.

When your carnival is finally published, you may want to email or tweet all the people whose articles you used and encourage them to mention the carnival on their own blogs or social media. Whether you send out a request for links or not, you will almost certainly get several math teachers sharing your post. Everyone has been very supportive that way.

I think that’s everything you need to know about how to host a carnival. But if you have any other questions, please ask.

And thank you for volunteering to host!

[Photo by Bob Jagendorf.]