Outreach

Delaware Math League, 2019-2020

As part of the Association for Women in Mathematics, I coached a 7th grade team from the Tarbiyah Islamic School of Delaware. They finished fourth in each of the regional competitions and were invited to the state-wide invitational meet (which was unfortunately canceled due to COVID restrictions). But we are still so proud of them!

Delaware Science Olympiad 2020

For the 2020 Delaware Science Olympiad, I co-advised a group of undergraduates from the Cyber Security Scholars Enrichment Program to organize and run a training workshop for the Division C CodeBusters exam. They also helped write, administer, and grade the exam. As we had so many volunteers for the event, I instead helped with the Fossils event. (Team pictured at right)

Past Delaware Science Olympiads

2019

As part of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, I led the design of the 2019 CodeBusters challenge for this years Delaware Science Olympiad as well as organizing and running the exam. I also assisted in writing the exam for Fermi Questions.

2018

This was my first year involved with the Delaware Science Olympiad. Along with a team of graduate students from University of Delaware, we ran a workshop and designed the event for Fermi Questions.

Delaware MATH-COUNTS

In January of 2018, several faculty and grad students were invited to give 45 minute interactive presentations for 6th graders from various Delaware schools for a one-day workshop organized by the MATHCOUNTS Foundation. We each gave our presentation to 4 groups of 30-40 students. I presented on Fourier analysis for audio processing organized as a Mathematica notebook. Using this format, I was able to run code in real-time, make adjustments as students asked questions, and directly include the students in the presentation by having them record short snippets of “I am Groot!” (the second Guardian’s of the Galaxy movie had recently come out) which we then pitch-shifted using Mathematica to alter each student from baby Groot to adult Groot.

Along the way, we were able to discuss the technical ideas of how people communicate both in analogue and digital form, and we graphed different representations of audio as both time-amplitude and time-frequency plots. We plotted both representations in Mathematica, and for the latter we discussed how this was similar to chords on a musical instrument. We were able to extensively explore the visual representation of signals and how mathematicians and engineers view these problems, and we also covered topics like sampling and the Nyquist rate and applications to modern streaming services. The presentation led to many interesting questions from both the students and their teachers on how mathematical research happens, what kinds of problems remain unsolved, and what types of careers are available for mathematicians. I greatly enjoyed this opportunity, and would love to do something similar again in the future by either updating this presentation or by building a new one motivated by concepts from graph theory.

You can download a copy of my presentation here. (PDF) (Mathematica Files)