1/9 New Year Math

Another new year, another chance to do some math around it! I saved a group of posts off of twitter but ended up leaning the most on a post on Math Misery by M. Shah.  http://mathmisery.com/wp/2019/12/31/20-math-puzzles-to-kick-off-2020/

Some of the other ideas:

Hell yeah it is. https://t.co/dItQJBCMOy — Bear St. Michael (@BearStMichael) January 4, 2020

Feliz… pic.twitter.com/Tju6yLw1bX — SAPM (@SAPMciruelos) December 31, 2019

Here’s a special countdown for 2020. Happy New Year! pic.twitter.com/mxjD0evMDJ — Fermat’s Library (@fermatslibrary) December 31, 2019

Before we dug into the Math I started with a quick rundown on the AMC 8 Results.  Overall I was really happy this year. The number of participants and group average was up, we had 7-8 DHR, HR MR recognitions and once again as a school we made the honor roll.  As far I could see there was a measurable improvement for everyone who took it last year as well.

We then talked about how to factor large numbers.  The expected ideas of looking for easy divisors or making a factor tree were volunteered fairly quickly.  I followed with some questions about how far you had to test. The first answer was all the way up to 2020 but I got a followup that only to the square root of 2020 was necessary. That answer naturally led to a discussion of which was correct and why. And finally I had the kids estimate/volunteer what the square root was in this case. It’s approximately 45 and there really aren’t that many primes up to there.  I think its always a bit encouraging how few numbers are necessary to look at even when the target seems fairly large. So armed with some ideas I had everyone break off for a few minutes to factorize 2020 on their own.  I walked around during this piece and gave some pointers to a few kids. After surveying room and making sure I saw tons of correct answers I had a volunteer show off their work on the board.

From here I gave the kids a choice. They could start working on the Math Misery problems or help draft some recruitment posters for next semester.  I had been dithering on whether to do the latter but decided I wanted fresh posters. That turns out to have been a good choice. Most of the kids were very excited to do some drawing. I literally had kids rushing for the poster board.

About 5 kids were focused on the problems and I spent most of my time checking in with them. That was actually fun since I had more time to interact on an individual level.  The one issue was the stats problem covered material out of scope so I had to tell everyone to skip it.

P.O.T.W

The Mathcounts problem this week was also themed around the new year so I chose to use it:

https://www.mathcounts.org/resources/problem-of-the-week/its-new-year