AUBURN - Mathematics and art crashed into one another Saturday at the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center.

Jacqueline Webster, the full-time elementary art teacher at the Southern Cayuga Central School District, was on hand in the Schweinfurth basement to demonstrate how the two subjects interrelate in “Math & Art Collide,” a program sponsored by the city of Auburn.

“Today's program has a lot of geometry and patterning,” Webster said before the program began. “I do projects at school like the ones we're doing today, so I just used that as a jumping-off point.”

Saturday's class is similar to ones being held weekdays through Aug. 18 as part of Schweinfurth's Summer Art Camp. Along with several other professional artists, Webster is an instructor there, too.

“I usually teach two sessions in the summer,” she said. “In two weeks, I'll be teaching a week-long class in sculpture.”

Classes like Webster's are for ages 9 to 12, and are ongoing for the next five weeks. Another program called “Art Explorations” is being held for ages 6 to 8.

Webster says she first teamed up with a math instructional support person to design the lesson.

“We started a club for third-graders, so this will be based on some projects we did then,” she said.

Attending the class Saturday was Lexie Stanzak, 8, of Auburn. A fourth-grader at St. Joseph's, she said this was her first time to go the art class.

Webster spread art supplies over several large tables, and once everything was set, Webster was off. The first project was a numerical version of the Spirograph game.

“This is a graph project in which students design a pattern within the graph, and then we'll translate that into a string of beads or something similar,” Webster said.

Next the class performed a project to design pictures on a grid, and then transferred the designs onto decorative paper.

“These exercises teach the kids good math and how it applies to the everyday world,” Webster said. “It really helps them use both sides of their brain.”