2014 Week of Science at St Andrew's Church of England Primary School (Bath UK)
During her sabbatical 18 months at the Department of Mathematical Sciences (University of Bath, UK, 2013-2015) she had the opportunity to contribute to scientific dissemination. As mother of two primary school pupils at St Andrew's Church of England Primary School she tried to establish a contact between the University of Bath and the school in two separate occasions.
The first one was during the week of Science organised by the school. She proposed a project for Year 2 class of her daughter Ginevra, on Fibonacci numbers and Nature. The idea was to prove to children of seven years old that Math is around us!
Fibonacci sequence is a naturally occurring pattern as in the numbers of the flowers petals (1,2,3,5,.. that’s why the four-leaf clover brings good luck), in pinecones and hurricane because a spiral can be constructing on squares of side given by the Fibonacci sequence that work like a grid. The lecture ended with the construction of the spiral by the school pupils: by using a big squared sheet they had to draw first the squares following the Fibonacci sequences and then the spiral by connecting them.
The personal history of Fibonacci has also a strong pedagogical meaning since he discovered and took the Indian- Arabic numbers to Europe during a business travel in Africa with his father, a merchant from Pisa. Scientific Research feeds by exchange with each part of the world! She got so emotional in seeing that a pupil, whose father was originally from Africa, felt very proud of his own origins and discovering children running away at the end of the school in the playground to look for flowers to count the numbers of petals!
2014 MegaMenger Project by Queen Mary University of London
The second opportunity was in occasion of MegaMenger Project by Queen Mary University of London. The project consisted in constructing a Menger Sponge: a three-dimensional fractal, which can be made by taking a cube and cutting out a square section through the centre in each of the three directions; then each of the resulting smaller cubes is cut out in the same way, and so on until you've removed infinitely many pieces. So each Menger Sponge is made from twenty identical-but-smaller Menger Sponges.
That project was promoted by Queen Mary University of London but immediately involved many other universities in UK and in particular Bath University https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Megamenger_Bath.jpg#/media/File:Megamenger_Bath.jpg. The project was carried out by master and Ph.D. students but they needed help to construct as much possible smaller and smaller Menger. Nadia Ansini got the idea to involve the older students, Year 6, of St Andrew's Church of England Primary School. The Director of the school, to approve the collaboration with the university project, asked to Ansini a private meeting to understand, in other words, what’s the Menger Sponge it is! N. Ansini just said that the students would be involved in a magic trick: they should participate in constructing an object which has zero volume but infinite surface area! That’s quite hard to figure out... But it worked!