Vassar 2016

Week 3 Class: Aerodynamics







Six Flags!

It's everyone's favorite field trip!  On Monday, July 25, the whole BEAM team headed to Six Flags New England for a day of roller coasters, bumper cars, and shopping for super hero capes!  After a full (and hot!) day at the park, we headed to Friendly's for dinner and then back to campus.  Here are some favorite photos of the day:


At the Water Park

Water park group

On Monday, July 18, the whole group (Vassar and Bard students, too!) went to Splashdown Beach for a fun water park day (even if it was shortened by the rain!).  Here are some photos of our day!


Weeks 1/2: Solving Big Problems

As mentioned earlier, all BEAM students study problem solving throughout the program.  Beyond Math Team Strategies, the other option is Solving Big Problems: working on the same problem for 2+ hours and really working to understand it.

In today's class, students investigated the following problem:

Which positive integers can be written as the sum of consecutive integers?


Students had a number of early conjectures, including:

  • All odd integers have this property.
  • If a given number is composed only of factors without this property, then that number also won't be possible to write as the sum of consecutive integers (so, if 4 = 1 * 2 * 2 and 1 and 2 are impossible, 4 is also impossible). 

The class was quickly able to prove the first conjecture, and then spent the next 2 hours working on the second.  Can you figure it out?

Week 1/2 Class: Math Team Strategies

How do strong mathematicians think? How do they work? That's the goal of our problem solving classes at BEAM!

At the beginning of the program, students got to choose between Solving Big Problems and Math Team Strategies.  In Math Team Strategies, the goal is to prepare for math competitions, like MATHCOUNTS, the AMC 8, or Purple Comet. Math competitions and math teams praise clever, efficient thinking, finding solutions and shortcuts that save time and still make mathematical sense!

In class, students were working on problems like the following one, combining their knowledge of geometry and number theory:

Pentagonal Numbers

And here are the students hard at work, trying to break the problem down and explain their solution. 

Week 1 Classes: Combinatorics

Can you answer these problems?

Can you answer these problems?

In combinatorics, students learn to count without counting.  Sure, you can count all the ways to make a word re-arranging the letters in the word cat.  But can you count all the ways to do it with goat?  Zebra?  Monkey?  In this class, students learn clever ways to account for every answer, without under or over counting.  Nice work, students! 

Icebreakers at Vassar

How do you start math camp?  With getting to know you games!  

At Vassar, our students played the following:

  • A rock, paper, scissors tournament
  • Human Bingo
  • Who's that? (a game where team members represent their team, a sheet is dropped, and you have to name the other person first)
  • Buzz (a math game about counting and multiples) and we then made it even harder by playing Fizz Buzz!
  • Human Knot
  • What's behind the green glass door?

Here's some photos of them getting to know each other!