Entry #13: Geometry in Super Mario 😄

Geometry in Super Mario

During the last weeks, I have been doing a project that I have really enjoyed: an infographic! Do you know what it is? Well, it is a form of representing information and data in a really visual and graphic way. Sounds good, doesn't it? 👌 

It has been a good experience, I must be honest, and you know what the best thing is? From my point of view, it is a quite feasible activity to be carried out with students in Primary Education. For example, when I was doing my practice period, one of my activities was to ask the students to make a poster with CANVA, and it was a success. So why not go one step further and make an infographic? 😀 I think that it can have many different benefits, such as developing creativity and the ability to distribute elements in space. Therefore, if we focus it on geometry I am completely sure that you, as teachers, would learn aspects that were completely unknown for you! 👨‍🏫👩‍🏫 For example, some students could focus their infographic on aspects such as geometry in cinema 🎥 or in sports ⚽, so that I am sure that it will be a source of inspiration for you too! 

Having said this, I decided to base my infographic on the geometry that can be found in the Super Mario Games, the famous Nintendo character. This infographic was created by using Piktochart, a resource which allows you to design graphic representations of different types, such as an infographic, a poster, a flyer... Anyway, I am speaking a lot but I have not shown you the infographic yet! Click here and you will see it! 👌

I have to be honest, a few months ago I would not have thought that geometry was so present in the Super Mario games... but wow! It is everywhere! 😃 Nevertheless, I do not want to repeat all the contents of my creation, so, instead of that, I will give you a few ideas that your students could perform to learn geometry with Super Mario. 

Plane figures!

This first activity would consist of asking students to look for plane figures in different levels of Super Mario, so that they must classify them according to their characteristics. However, before doing this, I recommend you to work with your students on the following video in order to introduce them to this context 😄:

So, between all the Super Mario games and in order to look for plane figures, I completely recommend the Super Mario Bros saga, since they are 2D games ✌. Of course, some students may not have any Super Mario games, so we could give them videos in which levels of those games are shown, so that they could search for those figures. For example, the following video is a whole walkthrough of a 2D Super Mario game, so we could tell students to write all the plane figures that they can see between two concrete minutes of that video and classify them according to their sides:

We could do exactly the same with 3D games, but looking for solids. In that sense, some interesting games are Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey, take a look at them! 👀 

Euclidean transformations!

Another interesting activity would consist of looking for Euclidean transformations in those games, that is, symmetries, rotations and translations. The way of performing the activity would be exactly the same as in the previous activity, so it does not make sense to repeat it. However, I have a challenge! Could you tell me which the following Euclidean transformations are? Write it in the comments! 😆

So, I hope you have liked this entry! If you have more ideas, please, write them in the comments! See you! 👋