09/09/2024

Mathematics Festival breaks audience record in its 3rd edition.

The 3rd edition of the National Mathematics Festival (FestMat) broke attendance records this year, bringing together 20,000 people at Marina da Glória in Rio de Janeiro. The event took place on September 5th, 6th, and 7th, and the first two days saw the participation of over 460 public and private schools. Now a fixture on the city's event calendar, FestMat will be held every two years.

“The Festival is not a time to learn mathematics, that is not the objective. The Festival is a time to be enchanted by mathematics, to have fun, and to allow those who have a difficult relationship with the subject to deconstruct that relationship. It is a celebration, an event of fun and entertainment,” stated Marcelo Viana, director-general of IMPA (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics), which has been promoting the Festival since 2017.

With the theme "Mathematics is Innovation," the event shows that the subject, so often feared, is present in our daily lives and is fundamental to technological development. "Mathematics sometimes seems like the villain to students, but it's presented here in a very cool way. That's what the Festival promised and it delivered very well," said João Pedro Ferreira, 12 years old, a participant in the event.

Newton Ribeiro, a mathematics teacher in the Arraial do Cabo municipal school system, traveled 165 km to bring 40 students from CIEP 147 to FestMat. “As a teacher, I think the event is great, it has a lot of innovation and new things that we can apply in the classroom, such as associating knowledge with games. It was fantastic for the students, it was worth coming from so far away.”

A success in this edition, the humanoid robot soccer game at IME (Military Engineering Institute) won the hearts of the students who cheered on the matches between the blue and red teams. “The robots are composed of various sensors. They have cameras in their mouths and foreheads. The game is a playful way for us to practice the application of mathematics itself because the computer vision algorithms, artificial intelligence, all of them are necessary for the robot to make decisions during the game,” explained Julio César Santana da Rosa Filho, a master's student at IME.

The most traditional attraction at FestMat, the square-wheeled bicycle, continued to intrigue and entertain visitors. This activity is the result of a partnership with the Federation of Industries of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Firjan) SESI, which also participated in this edition with the Firjan SESI Mathematics mobile unit.

Right at the entrance of FestMat, the virtual tour of Ancient Egypt caught the public's attention and was the experience with the longest queue during the event. The Space-XR Augmented Reality space, run by Visgraf (IMPA's Computer Graphics Laboratory), in partnership with Lapid (National Museum), BioDesign (PUC-Rio) and INT, transported participants to the tomb of Neferhotep , an Egyptian pharaoh who lived approximately 3300 years ago. “We worked together and developed a 360° documentary-style video. We sought to show how the excavation work functions on site,” stated Bernardo Alevato, designer at Visgraf.

The event also featured the 3D Atelier, where it was possible to bring drawings to life; a virtual escape room, which proposed solving logic problems in challenging environments; a musical activity that invited the public to manipulate fractions, BPM, and frequencies to create new melodies, among other attractions. In total, 20 interactive experiences, 22 lectures, and 12 roundtables were offered, in addition to the play "Numbers and Life," by Coletivo Comum, and the show-lecture "Mathematics Applied to the Tambourine."