Packaged Curriculum from BEAM Discovery

As we’ve run BEAM Discovery, we’ve developed a lot of wisdom and are excited to share curriculum and resources with the wider community. This year, we are releasing the first set of course materials, based on the class Truth, Lies, and Logic from our Logical Reasoning track. Two more courses are in progress and will follow soon. The courses will be posted free online for use by school clubs and other enrichment programs nationwide. They will also be used by faculty new to BEAM to get a clear sense of what a great BEAM course entails.

Learn more about working for BEAM in the summer by clicking here:

The Classes

Lesson plans developed by Halimeda Glickman-Hoch based on a class she taught at BEAM Discovery NYC in 2018 based off of notes of Daniel Zaharopol at BEAM Discovery NYC 2017.

These plans are released by Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. You may use these lesson plans freely for non-commercial purposes as long as you attribute BEAM. If you release an edited version, you may not release it with a more restrictive license.

Supplemental Information

Instructions

[something about how to download? or stuff about licenses?]

More Background on BEAM Discovery and BEAM students

[More about the context of our students? who BEAM students are and why this makes the lesson plans easy to use with many groups. Our students are curious and engaged, but new to formal math vocabulary and may have gaps in background knowledge, so we've designed friendly units to draw out students and keep them engaged. There are also challenging problems and extensions. I just think a summary of who we are and who are students are and how that informs our lesson plans would be cool here!]

The goal of this project is to design curriculum for BEAM Discovery, which is the introductory program to BEAM for the summer after 6th grade. BEAM Discovery is a five-week nonresidential program introducing mathematical reasoning, with four key topic threads:

• Logical Reasoning, which develops reasoning skills through puzzles and games;

• Math Team Strategies, which focuses on innovative problems requiring creative approaches;

• Math Fundamentals, which reinterprets math from school through a lens of “why does this work?”; and

• Applied Math, which shows how math is really used by professionals such as programmers, astronomers, data scientists, and biologists.

Our goal is to create a vibrant mathematical community with learning centered around beautiful and engaging mathematics, and to provide a taste of the kind of math students will do at BEAM’s later programs, which dive deeper into proof-based mathematics.

Glossary

• Open Math Time or OMT: an explanation of what it is