This summer brought back the opportunity to meet in person and with that the Department’s favorite outreach events: COSI Science Fest and the Beyond the Classroom summer camps, now in their fifth year.
COSI Science Fest
In 2019, the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) successfully hosted their first-ever Science Festival. Due to the pandemic, the second and third editions of the festival had to be virtual. But in 2022, the in-person festival returned. The Department of Mathematics, through its outreach initiative Buckeye Aha! Math Moments (BAMM), has been part of this festival since the beginning, and could not miss the in-person event.
On May 7th, the multi-day festival culminated with the Big Science Celebration, a science demonstrations fair held in the parks surrounding the museum. BAMM had a booth full of polygons, math-magic, and soap bubbles. Led by Prof. Bart Snapp and BAMM’s coordinator Monica Delgado, a group of graduate and undergraduate students from this Department performed math-inspired magic tricks and demonstrated the beautiful shapes soap film creates in front of an audience of marveled kids and adults. A big thank you to Dr. Bart Snapp and students Yiming Chen, Kacey Clark, Alina Li, Ryan ODonnell, River Oxenreider, and Mikey Reilly for volunteering their time and for their enthusiasm in sharing their love for math.
Beyond the Classroom Summer Camp
In 2018, a group of women at the Department of Mathematics, Ray Karpman, Erika Roldan, Maritza Sirvent, Debi Stout, and Feride Tiglay, organized the first math summer camp at The Ohio State University. They aimed to spark a love for mathematics in the new generation, as well as attract more non-male students to math careers.
Since then, the program has continued to be offered every summer, growing year by year. After two years of being virtual, 2022 marked the return of in-person camps. From June 6th to June 17th, the hallways of the Math Tower were filled with epsilons, as Erdös famously referred to kids.
Beyond the Classroom summer camp focuses on a different topic each year, looking to connect math with other areas that might be of interest to the young audience. The idea is that the topic would not repeat in a span of four years, so if a student attended the camp every summer during their high school years, they would not see the same topic. This being the camp’s fifth year, it was decided to work again on the topic of the inaugural year: the connections between math and music, although with a different approach. Prof. Bart Snapp, who has a passion for both math and music, lead the content design. A curriculum that looks at some aspects of music theory from a mathematical point of view was created. It explored topics like sound waves, polyrhythms, star polygons, and harmonics.
While preparing to return to in-person, however, it was clear that there was need to continue to offer a virtual program. Thus, this year students were given the choice to attend the in-person or the virtual camp. Families from outside Columbus, located in cities such as Cleveland, appreciated the opportunity to attend the program virtually.
The cohort of students included kids who like both math and music, kids with a music background but not a strong inclination for math, as well as kids who love math but have no music experience. They all learned something new in the camp.
The 2022 summer camp in numbers:
-
9 in-person high school students
-
32 in-person middle school students
-
39 virtual campers
-
7 graduate student TAs
-
3 undergraduate student TAs
-
5 instructors
The summer camps are a team effort and made possible with support from Bart Snapp, Debi Stout, Scott Zimmerman, alum Danny Lemmon, River Oxenreider, Natalie Nance, Alexander Patterson, Suxuan Chen, Zihao Fang, Deniz Genlik, Mario Gomez, Will Newman, Amogh Parab, Shifan Zhao, and Monica Delgado. A big thank you to the staff members who also contributed to making summer camps possible: Dawn Jones, Karen Blessing, Denisse Clark, Jack Zuefle, Ryan Kilbane, Ben Pope, and William Gehring, as well as Sarah Dove from the Office of Distance Education.
Beyond the Classroom 2022 received support from the Mathematical Association of America through the Dolciani Mathematics Enrichment Grant, and from the American Mathematical Society through the Epsilon Fund.
A short history of the program:
-
Girls only
-
High school students
-
Three weeks, three days a week
-
10 students
-
Hosted at the STEAM Factory
-
Symbolic fee with waivers available
-
Girls only
-
High school students
-
Two weeks, daily
-
14 students
-
The program moved to campus (Math Tower)
-
Symbolic fee with waivers available
2020 – Polyforms and Polytopes in Art
-
The program opened to all genders and middle school students
-
One week for middle school, one week for high school. Due to the high demand, an open to all program was offered during a third week.
-
More than 200 students in total, with different levels of engagement
-
Virtual
-
Free of cost
-
One week for middle school, one week for high school
-
71 students
-
Virtual
-
Supplies were mailed to students
-
Symbolic fee with waivers available
-
Back to in-person at the Math Tower!
-
One week for middle school, one week for high school, one week for a virtual program
-
80 students
-
Free of cost
