On Sunday, the BEAMers went hiking at North Point, during which they marveled at the beautiful scenery and the wonders of nature. A picnic took place as well, volleyball, Frisbee, and math conversations happening on the sidelines. On Monday, the BEAMers went to Splash Down Beach, a water park with exciting rides. The BEAMers from Bard got to meet the BEAMers from Vassar. Both sites had a fun-and-sun-filled day. Time for week two!
The End of the First Academic Week- Saturday, July 16, 2016
It was a BEAMing Saturday at Bard, and this meant a lot of things for the BEAMers:
1) The first academic week was over, and the students got to choose new classes for the upcoming week.
2) The solutions to the challenge problems were formally presented in front of the entire BEAM group by the students who solved them. Jacob, one of the BEAMers, solved the third challenge problem (meaning the BEAMers get a pizza party as a prize), and presented the solution to it alongside the other students who solved the other two: Milani, Deja, and Miriam.
3) BEAM was visited by a guest speaker: the founder of BEAM, Daniel Zaharopol.
4) It was relay day! Students competed in teams to complete competition-style math problems.
5) After solving challenge problems one and two, the students got to reap their prize in the evening: movie night with popcorn!
What a way to end the first week of class. The field trips awaited!
BEAMing Times
Challenge Problem #2: SOLVED!
"I felt happy and excited that I was able to solve it. I learned that things can be easier if you take it slowly and look at all the possibilities instead of limiting the possibilities that you're going to choose from," Mariam revealed, having solved the second challenge problem alongside Milani, who solved the first challenge problem as well.
Since the BEAMers solved the second challenge problem before Friday evening, as a prize, they will get popcorn with their movie night. The movie to be screened is "Ride Along 2".
The second challenge problem was: Take the product of ninety-four 9's and ninety-four 4's, and find out the sum of the digits of this number.
Meet BEAM
For the lounge every year, we design staff and student faceboards, to help people keep track of all the members of the BEAM staff. Meet the BEAM 2016 Vassar staff:
And here are the BEAM 2016 Vassar students!
We are going to have a great summer!
Daily Life at BEAM
Challenge Problem #1 Is Solved!- Wednesday, July 13, 2016
"Afterwards, when we actually solved it [the first challenge problem], it was a good feeling, because we worked really hard on this and we had to do a really difficult explanation that most 7th graders going on to 8th grade can't do," explained Milani excitedly, having solved the first challenge problem alongside Deja the night before.
"I felt really happy solving the problem, because we finally got Malcolm to stop asking 'why?' and 'how?' and 'what'd you do to get there?', and it felt really nice. It was a happy feeling to get it off of our chest," Deja agreed, ecstatic at the thought of finally having pleased Malcolm, the Site Director at Bard, with their explanation for the first challenge problem.
The prize for solving the first challenge problem is a movie night for all of the BEAMers. If the students solve the second challenge problem by this Friday, they get popcorn on the movie night, which is to take place this upcoming Saturday.
The first challenge problem was: What number divides evenly into every 4-digit palindrome? Prove it.
Week 1 Classes: Combinatorics
Can you answer these problems?
In combinatorics, students learn to count without counting. Sure, you can count all the ways to make a word re-arranging the letters in the word cat. But can you count all the ways to do it with goat? Zebra? Monkey? In this class, students learn clever ways to account for every answer, without under or over counting. Nice work, students!
Icebreakers at Vassar
How do you start math camp? With getting to know you games!
At Vassar, our students played the following:
- A rock, paper, scissors tournament
- Human Bingo
- Who's that? (a game where team members represent their team, a sheet is dropped, and you have to name the other person first)
- Buzz (a math game about counting and multiples) and we then made it even harder by playing Fizz Buzz!
- Human Knot
- What's behind the green glass door?
Here's some photos of them getting to know each other!
BEAMing Moments
First day of class and awesome activities for the BEAMers. This week's classes: Math Team Strategies; Logic and Proof; Maps, Puzzles, and Graph Theory; Solving Big Problems; Combinatorics; and Number Theory.
