Is this the real life? Connecting mathematics across cultures

Internet memes are hilarious virtual objects widely created and shared by young people in social media, with the purpose of gaining social endorsement by showing wittiness. Mathematical Internet memes are a mathematically themed variation of memes that stemmed spontaneously on the Internet. In this study we test these as means to engage students, connecting school mathematics to young people everyday culture. We present here a teaching experiment carried out in a 10th-grade class group, who created mathematical memes on a given subject and reacted to similarly-themed memes produced by the authors. We describe this exchange as an example of boundary crossing, involving two communities – students and teachers - that fruitfully traded knowledge across the increasingly permeable boundary between young people popular culture and institutional scholastic culture.