4/22 Some Experimenting with Math History

About 5 months ago we were asked to participate ion STEAM night (basically the Science Fair) and enough kids were interested that I agreed.  We’re now about two weeks away and it was time to do some planning around it as a group.   First I generated a list of kids who were able to man our table and then we brainstormed about ideas and then voted as a group for which ones(s) to actually present.

The top three were popular enough that most of the room wanted to do all of them. So for now we’ll attempt that.

• Dots and Boxes game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_and_Boxes
• Travelling Salesman Problem:  We haven’t done this in club and the kids came up with it. So I asked for them to think about how they would present it.
• Present the 3 related problems from last week:  Last Week

I’ve bought posters and we’ll spend the first half of next week making posters, designing any handouts and talking about how we’ll run the table. 

For the second part of the day I experimented with the slides from https://mns.co.il/.   This was a set of slide decks on recent Math discoveries that seemed interesting. We tried out the Kepler Conjecture deck. It took about 20 minutes to walk through. I’m not used to using someone else’s slides so that was a bit different for me. I’m sure I could be a little smoother on a second attempt. Overall: the information is good but its a little history heavy with not quite enough math exercises to do along the way.  I surveyed afterwards and that was the main takeaway from the kids as well. So I think if I used again instead of directly taking the slides I might reorganize them and build in more group tasks to try out the problems. 

At this point I still had about 25 minutes left so I took out a fun probability/constraint exercise I had gotten from Patrick Honner.

After explaining the rules I let the kids breakout in groups (which they seemed to really be missing *during the slides)  While walking around and working on the dice I noticed a few things:

• Notions of compound probability commonly  came up.
• The big question at each table was always how many repeat numbers can I use?
• Almost everyone wanted to cut the dice out at some point.
• One table spontaneously began chanting sohcahtoa for some reason which was fairly amusing.