The Number Hunter Kickstarter Project

Stephanie Glen of Statiticshowto.com has started a The Number Hunter, a new Kickstarter Project. The aim of the project is to make mathematics more fun and interesting. Ms. Glen describes the project below.

A cross between Crocodile Hunter and Bill Nye the Science Guy, The Number Hunter is an educational, web-based TV show for preteens. 

Bill Nye taught kids that science is FUN. He showed them the EXPLOSIONS first and then the kids went to school to learn WHY things exploded.  Kids learn about dinosaurs and amoeba and weird ocean life to make them go “wow”. But what about math? Kids are given the dreaded worksheets. Ugh. Math is actually much more exciting than it’s given credit for. Saying that math is all about worksheets and numbers is like saying that chemistry is all about beakers and pipettes.

Most people don’t know that the moons of Endor in “Star Wars” were built with fractal geometry; or that Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Giza and a myriad of other famous buildings were created using the golden ratio. It’s also a little known fact that nearly all the math we use today came from exotic locations. Take binary code for example — it was invented by the Bambara tribe in Mali, Africa thousands of years ago and it’s still used in villages today. Can you imagine how powerful it would be for inner-city schoolchildren to know that the math they are learning is a part of their heritage?

Each episode of The Number Hunter introduces one topic in mathematics and explores it in an original, adventurous way – covering every corner of the planet. Sample episodes from the show:

I: Roots Takes us to Africa, where the origin of binary code is traced to a village in Mali.

II: American Pi Explores America’s fascination with the number pi, from a man who had the first 100 digits of pi tattooed on his arm to the supercomputers finding the sixty-trillionth digit of pi.

III: Score! Showcases how math is used extensively in sports around the globe, from crowd control at Wembley Stadium in London to drafting players for the NFL.

If we back up the project, I think it will be very helpful to a lot of kids. If you want to know more about the project, visit the Number Hunter’s Kickstarter page.