Bard Math CAMP Day 4

8/30/2018

Today was the fourth day of CAMP!

In art, students continued to expand on the fractal idea that they began to work on Wednesday. At the beginning of class, students were able to finish or improve upon their fractal paintings. After, students received clay (of either black, white or gray coloring) and kneaded them until they were thin enough to be put together, Students kneaded them to fit a triangular shape, then combined two of the kinds of clay and stretched them out. When the students cut the clay, a triangular fractal was visible. Students then used these triangular fractal cross-sections to spell out their names or create designs.

 

In computer science, students learned the properties of boolean logic relating to truth tables. Students learned about true/false statements that contained the boolean operators or/and. After working through more complex logical statements (i.e. true and (not true or not false)), students utilized these ideas to work with circuits. Students considered the properties of circuitry and the flow of electricity with boolean logic.

In math class, with Japheth, we learned about Hasse diagrams: a handy way to organize a number and all of its divisors to learn more about the divisors themselves. After learning two examples of these diagrams we all tackled creating the Hasse diagrams of the numbers one through thirty. We then sorted these interesting pictures and discussed our findings as a group. This helped us to solve one of our mysteries from Day 3 of how to characterize numbers with exactly four divisors. Through this exploration we showed that all numbers with exactly four divisors are either the product of two distinct primes or the cube of a prime!

After-lunch electives included Zome Tool, Open Studio, and Rubik’s Cube.

Blog by: Elliott Goldstein, Meagan Kenney, and Maya Schwartz.