Bard Math CAMP Day 1

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Bard Math Circle
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8/27/2018

Today was the first day of CAMP!

The students started their day by collecting their t-shirts, making their name tags, and going into the auditorium for some morning activities.  Morning activities included working on a Rubik’s cube mosaic, playing cards, and juggling.

 Starting with the warm-up activity, scavenger hunt, the kids hit off the art session with flaming conversation. The scavenger hunt was designed for them to get to know each other with prompt like: “find someone who has a dog with a fun fact” or “find someone whose favorite season is winter”.
The students then worked with beads to make necklaces that would “spell out” various binary spellings of words. The ASCII alphabet (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a binary system in which each letter is formed by a certain pattern of 1’s and 0’s. With two different colors of beads, students assigned each a value of 1 or 0, and then made words/initials out of these beads. Students also learned how to make “magic wooden blocks”, a structure of blocks that could be manipulated and moved in various ways.
In Computer Science, we learned how to develop the logical operation called XOR or “exclusive or.” We used our knowledge of other logical operations to extract the compound logic operators that would give us XOR, which is only true when the inputs differ (that is one is true and one is false). After forming the XOR using our Boolean operators we acted out how XOR would play out in a circuit. Some of us acted as different currents while others were gatekeepers who determined the output that would occur at each logic gate depending on how the two currents entered the gate as on or off. And then some of us used this new logical operation to further explore how one can use Boolean operators in Python, while other students built the XOR circuit using little bits!
In Math, we delved into symbolic logic through truth tables. The students learned about the binary operators “and” and “or”, as well as the unary operator negation.  After learning about truth tables, they worked on riddles about an island that has two types of people: liars and truth-tellers.  This relates to binary by considering the falses to be 0’s and the truths to be 1’s, thus linking the mathematics and computer science workshops.
The after-lunch electives today included recess games, Rubik’s cube, and hiking.
Blog by: Meagan Kenney, Leah Leiner, Elliott Goldstein, Shuang Cai, and Maya Schwartz.

Japheth Wood

I’m Japheth Wood (he/him), the Bard Math CAMP co-director, and a math professor at Bard College. CAMP (which is an acronym for Creative and Analytical Math Program) is a very special week of the year for our young math community. It's inspiring to see our students return year after year. This is our 11th summer of CAMP! We're back once again on the idyllic Bard College campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, and thankful to the CAMP students, parents, and staff, for making this mathemagical week happen. Notably, we've (finally) had our first CAMP reunion this past June, an event that I know will grow to be an integral part of what we do.

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Frances Stern

My name is Frances Stern (she/her/hers)! I’ve been teaching math at CAMP since the first year, making sure our math theme has a connection to art and computer. It’s fun to show students math that they don’t see in school. I've retired from daily teaching but continue to teach for the New York Math Circle & students who are seeking more math in their lives. My hobbies include learning to draw, paint, & juggle, reading, walking & folk dancing. I’ve written 2 books for teachers and parents called “Adding Math, Subtracting Tension” (for different age-ranges of children). They pay as much attention to how to keep out of a fight (what many parents told me is a problem) as they do to math.

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