April 1, 2018 Newsletter - no joke
Math-POW! News - Spring 2018
First off, welcome to the new Student Math Circle at MSU-Billings. Dr. Tien Chih is organizing the bi-weekly program for middle school students. If you’ll be nearby, do contact him and think about volunteering to do a session! I thank you for your help in getting the word out about Math-POW! to wonderful math outreach leaders, like Dr. Chih. We’ve had a few new people join the Math-POW! group and I’m starting to get new information to add to the website. I’ve updated the most relevant deadlines below including several grant and event opportunities.
I’m especially interested in encouraging you to attend the PNW-MAA section meeting and present in our Math-POW! Session on Saturday, April 21. You can still submit abstracts this weekend. Please do so! If you're able to go I think this would be a great opportunity to initially meet people in the group if you’re able to attend.
After the April meeting, my next steps for Math-POW! work on submitting a Spencer Grant so support a Math-POW! Conference - I'm working for the May 1 deadline. If we miss that we'll be going for August. I'll let you know.
Several of you have started to host local math festivals. This is a great opportunity to reach out to your local community, start working with local volunteers, and learn more about your local support for math outreach. I've added some notes for planning your own festival to the website, https://sites.google.com/view/mathpow/resources/running-a-math-festival and encourage you to volunteer at some of these festivals if you get a chance in the future.
- Great Puzzle Hunt. April 14, Western Washington https://greatpuzzlehunt.com/
- April 15 - Deadline for the call out for STEM Learning Connected to Afterschool Settings. http://csl.nsta.org/2017/10/early-stem-learning/
- PNW MAA Section Meeting - April 20-April 22. Seattle University, including a Math-POW! Session of outreach activities. https://www.seattleu.edu/scieng/math/talks-and-events/pnw-maa-section-meeting-2018/ . The annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Section of the MAA will take place at Seattle University, April 20-21. Abstracts for general contributed talks, undergraduate talks and special session talks are now being accepted. Submit an abstract for a 15-minute math outreach activity this weekend!
- Global Math Week 2018 will happen on October 10th, 2018! Over 1.7 million students and teachers participated in the 2017 Global Math Week, all discussing exploding dots! See my post about the event here. The topic won’t change this year and their goal is 10 million students. I’ll be talking about the project in April at the PNW MAA section meeting.
Finally, need some new math outreach lesson ideas? Check these out…
- SIGMAA- MCST. At January’s JMM meeting the SIGMAA-MCST organized a session on Math Circle activities with Topics with Visual or Kinesthetic Components. Visit http://sigmaa.maa.org/mcst/ to see some of the materials that were shared from this and past conferences.
- Math and Art, I tried a new lesson on Math and Art this quarter. The activities that we did are outlined here, Google Slides of Math and Art
- Read Dan Finkel's latest article on making & breaking conjectures in the current issue of MAV's 'Common Denominator'
- David Scott did Mathematical Problem Solving Workshop for Teachers about Math and Gerrymandering. To learn more contact David, scott@pugetsound.edu.
- Dr. Tien Chih has been sharing activities of the MSU-Billings student circle online, https://twitter.com/TChihMath
That should do it. This is the Spring newsletter. I think I'm going to switch to a more regular sending of small announcements (grant/ volunteer/ academic opportunities)
and then save the newsletter for every 2-3 months for regular announcements of our achievements. Each newsletter will continue to share upcoming events and hopefully one resource for your outreach program. The goal is to provide a quick resource as opposed to a long read.
Please email me if you have items to add to the newsletter or topics/questions you’d like me to address in future newsletters.
With that, thank you for your support of outreach, education and enrichment!