# Eventmath/Contributing

| Welcome | Lesson plans | Contributing | Tasks | Impact | Participants | Discussion |

## How to contribute math lesson plans based on current events!

Welcome, math educators!
* Do you have an idea for a math lesson plan based on current events?
* Would you like to publish your idea and get help developing it?
* Would you like to share a complete lesson plan and receive feedback on it?
Follow the steps below to turn your idea into an Eventmath lesson plan or bite-sized activity!

## Find a news article or social media post

Each Eventmath lesson plan is based on an openly-accessible news article or social media post, so your first step is to find one. If you need inspiration, try the following websites:
* TheUpshot (New York Times)
* Data Journalism (Guardian)
* ProPublica: Graphics & Data
* Pew Research Center
* FiveThirtyEight
* NPR: Science
Or, if you already have a lesson plan in mind based on an application of mathematics, search for a news article, blog post, or social media post that covers that topic.

## Choose a title

You can easily revise almost everything you contribute, but the lesson plan's title automatically goes into its web address (URL), so it’s not as easy to change. Therefore, it's worthwhile to spend a minute making a good title.

### Example 1

* Bad: "Election math"
* Good: "Proportions and voting power under the Electoral College"

### Example 2

* Bad: "Integration in epidemiology"
* Good: "Comparing areas under COVID-19 curves"

### Checklist

* Be specific! Include both the math content (e.g. "proportions") and application domain (e.g. "Electoral College").
* Be concise! Aim for around five words. Shorter is better.
* Follow conventions! Avoid acronyms, special characters, and punctuation. Use sentence case capitalization.

## Search for your title

Use the search box below to check for existing lesson plans with similar titles. If you find one that's essentially the same as yours, help improve that lesson plan, instead of creating your own!
On the search results page, if you are prompted to create a new page, please ignore that.

## Start the lesson plan

If your idea is new, create the lesson plan using the box below! It'll take you to an editor with a preloaded lesson-plan template.
On the edit page, you'll have to click save at the bottom, or your page won't be created.

## Share and collaborate

Now that you've created a lesson plan, you can...
* Share it on Twitter with the #Eventmath hashtag! Let people know they can add content or an endorsement.
* Link to it from a public class or faculty webpage! This helps Eventmath appear in search engine results.
* Include yourself in the Eventmath Participants tab! There, you'll also learn how to set up a free account.
* Add it to your watchlist and set up email notifications! You'll find out about endorsements and other contributions.

## To-do list (temporary section)

Per the proposal, we will eventually have a video that walks contributors through various types of edits. We may embed that video under "Start the lesson plan," along with the page creation form. (After testing the workflow with the first example lesson plan, we may record the process of adding the second example lesson plan as part of the video.)