Is this the real life? Connecting mathematics across cultures

Internet memes are hilarious virtual objects widely created and shared by young people in so-cial media, with the purpose of gaining social endorsement by showing wittiness. Mathemati-cal Internet memes are a mathematically themed variation of memes that stemmed spontane-ously 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.