I am a high school senior student. Soon, I am giving a presentation about the Fibonacci sequence and I am searching for a creative way to start my speech.
I was wondering whether someone in this community can help me a little bit?
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6$\begingroup$ Welcome! Just a few questions to help you improve your post. What is your audience? Fellow classmates, for fun? Or teachers, for an assignment? Are you trying to engage the audience to get their attention? Or are you trying to make them better understand the material? In other words ... this is a site for mathematics educators, so to answer your question, we need more information about how your situation pertains to education and effective communication of mathematics. $\endgroup$– Brendan W. SullivanMay 12, 2018 at 17:48
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1 Answer
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ADVICE:
When you have a question about a speech, you should give us more information to help you. Especially how long is the speech (it affects how much intro you do). But also the audience. And even how important this is to you and how long you will spend preparing it. It helps us help you and may help you strategize also.
ANSWER:
I would start with a biographical "hook", using Fibonacci, the man. People are interested in people. We evolved with incredible brains at facial recognition, but not analytical computer minds. So if there is some personality hook. It can draw people in and make the "medicine" (abstract math) go down easier. Not a full biography, since that is not your subject. But enough to get us "hooked" before you start having the chalkboard covered with numbers added together.
This is not purely motivation for a slick intro, but also serves a pedagogical purpose. Our human minds tend to form patterns and associations to aid memory. If people have a little mental image of the Fibonacci guy as a man, it may aid their remembering the topic itself as a topic (even if they forget the math).
OUTLINE:
Intro: Something about how he learned from the Arabs about numbers and wanted to show everyone in Europe that Arabic numerals (really from India) were way easier than Roman numerals for doing math with. He made a great contribution here and wrote a famous textbook, teaching people to use the numbers we all know now instead of the strange Roman numeral movies that we see in movies mostly. But this wasn't his most important contribution. His most important contribution was just a little example in his book that has made people marvel for centuries and showed a beautiful pattern hiding in numbers.
Tell the rabbit story.
Do some math and show numbers on the chalkboard. Gotta have some of that!
Give some applications or examples of the pattern in nature. Use visual aids, here....slide with flower petals or pine cone. Girl flipping her hair in the spiral. Etc.
Conclude...circle back with some "moral" of the talk, in addition to the recap. "In the Fibonacci sequence, we have learned how to create the numbers of the sequence by adding the previous two numbers to make a new one. Then we saw that this sequence is found in many places in nature (the spiral, flowers, pine cones, etc.) We've also seen that what can seem like a small example in an arithmetic book, can end up being marveled at by people for centuries in the future. Sometimes great things can come out of what seem like silly math puzzles." [Or whatever, you think a "moral" might be...being open to other cultures, becoming involved in work as a teenager, whatever you think is interesting from a human perspective. Doesn't matter per se, but have some narrative message or moral at the end, like an Aesop's Fable (just find one). A computer could care less, but pattern forming humans need some meaning.]
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$\begingroup$ I do not understand why you shortened the post so much. I rolled it back to the original version. As it is was in the edited version, it is arguably not substantive enough for an answer post. Maybe you could aim for somthing in the middle. $\endgroup$– quid ♦May 13, 2018 at 10:45