Julia Robinson Festival

The Julia Robinson Festival is my favorite volunteer activity of the year.  Here we’re setting up all the tables and just getting ready for ~500 kids from around the region to file in. There’s an adult/mentor at each one who helps the students with the problems. The kids wander around a travel from table to table playing with the math.  I think what makes this special is the chance to work with a few dozen  new kids over 3 hours in a very small 8:1 max ratio and the process of watching them make discoveries. Because of the nature of the event, the students are also very excited  and the energy tends to feed off itself.

I really like having a big group to facilitate collaboration so as soon as the kids come in I work a bit to draw them to the table. Once I get going I even had a few kids giving testimonials to other ones that were milling around the outskirts.  This was a good station  (I picked one from the set that interested me and I thought I could draw a lot out of) so typically I think they were working more than a half hour.

This year I took lots of pictures of the kids’ work. Part of what I loved about this problem was the geometry is produced.  In my  approach to guiding the exploration I tended to emphasize the triangle numbers and potentially finding the formula for them. I had some kids looking for formulas for numbers of intersections. Its also interesting to talk about the number of regions which has a surprising behavior where it appears exponential at first and then breaks down into something more complex.