The farm is using fractal-farming to help educate people about fractals, said Jonathan Wolfe, executive director of the Fractal Foundation.
Fractals are a mathematic representation of a reoccurring image, he said. These typically represent complex systems.
“Farms are ecological systems that are complex and yet managed by people,” Wolfe said. “Fractals are an illustration of that same phenomena; it can be applied many places and farming is one of them.”
Inside the maze, laid out for a scavenger hunt, there are different educational panels that depict patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence and spirals in sunflowers, he said, to incorporate educational aspects of farming and fractals.
“People in the maze can find the fractal cracking patterns in the mud, or the branching patterns of cottonwoods trees, not at all abstract but things that you can find right around you,” Wolfe said.
The underlying educational point is about the ability to form complexity by repeating a simple process, he said. A common example found at the maze is the cottonwood tree, he said. When a tree comes out of the ground, the branches spread after hundreds of years, which results in the cottonwoods forming thousands of tiny branches similar to a fractal.
“Fractals are important because they make mathematics interesting and exciting to learn,” Wolfe said. “Kids really need that. We are failing in our schools to generate that kind of interest.”
Beth Arnold, an organizer of the Fractal Maize Maze, agrees with Wolfe’s perspective on educating kids. The maze has a different educational theme each year because it is important to have an educational component, she said.
“It’s really cool to connect this theoretical idea of fractals to the plants and different things that are happening in the natural world right in front of you,” Arnold said.
The farm has many “fractivities” for the duration of the maze, including an adobe, brick-making and land-art installation, she said. The children carve their initials in their block of adobe they make, so everybody gets to be a part of this great big triangle, she said.
“A lot of school kids who have been here so far have been able to make the bricks and they get really excited about getting muddy,” Arnold said. “It is exciting to teach making adobe because that is a heritage that belongs to this part of the world.”
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Along with arts and crafts, Maize Maze also puts together a natural scavenger hunt for the participating kids, she said. The maze is set up in such a way that the viewer is interacting with a fractal based design and looking for natural representations of fractals, she said.
“It was exciting to put together the scavenger hunt that is inside the maze because it is really cool to connect this theoretical idea of fractals to the plants and the different things that are happening right there in the natural world,” Arnold said.
Moriah Carty is a staff reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @MoriahCarty.
