For the first time in New Mexico
Fun
Mathematical
Puzzles
Games
Prizes
Friday February 24, 2017
9:30AM-1:30PM
Santa Fe Community College
6401 Richards Ave., Santa Fe, NM 87508
Presented by:
STEM Santa Fe
Santa Fe Community College
Math Circles Collaborative of New Mexico
Summary Report
Prepared by: Lina Germann
http://stemsantafe.org/news-events/julia-robinson-mathematics-Festival-santa-fe/
Introduction
The mission of the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival (JRMF) is to inspire students to explore the
richness and beauty of mathematics through activities that encourage collaborative, creative problem
solving. Julia Robinson Mathematics Festivals have been held in 16 states and three countries.
STEM Santa Fe, Santa Fe Community College, and Math Circles Collaborative of NM were excited to
bring this Festival to New Mexico for the first time.
So what actually happened in our Julia Robinson Math Festival? Seventh and eighth grade students
flooded into a large room of tables—two tables per activity—and began to play with (explore or
investigate) the mathematical puzzle or game. The table leaders engaged the students in the
activities without solving the problems for them. Most of the activities had manipulatives or
worksheets, and while the mathematics may not have been immediately clear to the students, it was
often deep. The students gained a good intuition of the problem before the math became clear—but
the math was very much present in the patterns being explored. Students might have found an
activity not to their liking, but we had fifteen different activities for students to choose from during the
two hours of the Festival. At the end of that time we served the students lunch and treated them to a
large group exploration of yet another Math Circle activity led by one of the founder of the Julia
Robinson Math Festivals.
The schedule for our Festival was as follows:
Friday February 24, 2017 JRMF-Santa Fe Schedule of Events
8AM
8:30AM
9:30AM
10AM
12 Noon
12:30 PM
1:30PM
Volunteer Check-in and Breakfast
Table Leaders Program Led by special guest Josh Zucker
Teacher and Student Check-in
Student Mathematics Activities – Jemez Rooms
Math Circle for Teachers and Chaperones Led by Josh Zucker – Room 414B
Survey, Group Photo & Raffle
Lunch & Group Activity
Wrap
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Student Mathematics Activities and their Table Leaders:
We had 43 volunteers who served as Table Leaders (plus 2 more that were trained as Table Leaders
but were unable to attend the Festival). Table Leaders ran the activities for the students. We drew
volunteers from a wide variety of STEM professions as well as from K-12 and higher education. The
volunteers were eager to guide students to practice mathematics using creativity and multiple
approaches, while the students got to meet “real” people from STEM professions.
For this Festival, students had a choice to circulate around 15 unique math activities choose which
one they wanted to try. The descriptions of the activities follow:
Space Chips
Cook up some polyhedrons by following simple recipes. Invent your own recipes, too!
Table Leaders: Bobby Kosowski, Lynn Heffron , Nikki Copeland
Wolves and Sheep
How many sheep can you place on a field, so that none can be attacked by the simpleminded wolf?
Table Leaders: Daniel F Coope, Phyllis Baca, Tim Michael
Cookie Monster
How fast can the cookie monster eat all of the cookies, if he must follow some simple rules?
Table Leaders: Esther Milnes, Melissa Carter, Toni Zupanc
Switching Light Bulbs
Can you see the light? That is, can you see the patterns in light bulbs that are left on, after following a
series of simple rule to switch them on and off?
Table Leaders: Aaron G. Tumulak, Nicholas Kunz, Tracy Sadler
ConHex
A simple game of strategy, where each player attempts to claim spaces to form an unbroken chain
between opposite sides of the board.
Table Leaders: Ed Barker, Reuben Hersh*, Robert Shankin
Folding Fractals
Fold a long strip of paper in half several times. Can you see a pattern in the creases formed along the
length of the paper? What sorts of route do we trace if we use the creases to direct our turns along a
path?
Table Leaders: Paree Allu, Annette Hatch, Creighton Edington
Hexaflexagons
How can you fold a strip of paper into a shape that can be “flexed”, revealing several different faces
than were visible at the start?
Table Leaders: Carolyn Stupin, John Pantano, Nicole Berezin
Mondrian’s Art Puzzle
Let your inner artist out, to paint a canvas using colored rectangles. But there’s a catch: each
rectangle must be a different shape or size.
Table Leaders: Greg Malone, Michelle R Sherman, Thiago Brito
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Color Triangle Challenge
Try to find patterns that allow you to predict colors that will appear in rows of dots. Each row is
produced from the one above it, following simple rules.
Table Leaders: Anna Romero, Dean Gerber, Sandra Bradley
Difference Engine
How long can you keep a simple subtraction process going, before running out of interesting
differences?
Table Leaders: Gordon McDonough, Heidi Henderson, Liz Martineau, Mark Bailey*
Estimation Games
Use simple calculations, and your intuition, to estimate some unexpected quantities.
Table Leaders: Cody Smith, Emma Gould, Mary Lynn Collins
Pillage and Profit
A twist on the game of Dots and Boxes – but instead of capturing as many squares as possible, we’re
after gold doubloons!
Table Leaders: Allyson Holley, Elizabeth Kuehl, Laurel Stritzinger
Primes in Evenland
In Evenland, the citizens never managed to invent the number one; instead, they started with 2, and
built up sums and products from that starting point. What can we say about prime numbers in
Evenland?
Table Leaders: Carla Romero, Leona Tsinnajinnie
Star Polygons
Under what conditions can you draw a star using all the vertices of a polygon, without lifting your
pencil from the paper?
Table Leaders: Aiyana Pendleton, Carrie Wood, Teri Roberts
Stomping on Dots
Use specially shaped blocks to “stomp out” dots on a grid of squares. But if you stomp on a square
without a dot, a new one appears! Can you stomp out all the dots?
Table Leaders: Blaine Collins, John Bogdan, Steven Rudnick
* Attended training session but couldn’t make the Festival.
All the above activities are described in more
detail on the Math Circles Collaborative of
New Mexico website,
www.mathcirclesnm.org.
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Thank you!
Many thanks to our volunteers listed above as Table Leaders. Thank you also to our volunteers who
helped in other capacities: Steve Bradley, Sandy Frost, Tim Germann, Stephen Guerin, Pam Homer,
Mary Jensen, and Ralph Milnes. Thank you to our dedicated photographer Vincent Harrild and to the
energetic behind-the-scene volunteer Andie Manzanares. We couldn’t have done it without you all.
We would like to especially thank AAUW of Santa Fe, NM for spreading the word and recruiting
volunteers, as well as Santa Fe Preparatory School for all the color printing and copies, and Nambe
for donating a precious gift to our special out-of-town guest.
Also many thanks to the SFCC staff who went above and beyond: President Randy Grissom, John
Pantano, Fran Nawrocki, Ben Lauer, Emily Drabanski, and the OIT department. Thank you Nick
Telles, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer of SFCC, for welcoming the
participating students to campus at the Festival.
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And finally, a big “Thank You” to our sponsors!
We couldn’t have done it without you!
Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival – Santa Fe Planning Committee:
Lina Germann, Chair
Nick Bennett
Vanessa Job
Jason Morgan
James Taylor
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Festival Outcome
Number of participants:
7th-8th grade students: 148 (58% girls)
Teachers and Chaperones: 14
Volunteers (STEM advocates): 59
Number of schools participating: 7
Out-of town special guests: 1
Schools represented:
Gonzales Community School, Ortiz Middle School, Bernalillo Middle School, Santo Domingo Middle
School, Cochiti Middle School, Las Lunas Middle School, San Felipe Pueblo Elementary School.
Special Guest: Josh Zucker, Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival Math Director
Joshua Zucker was our special guest for the Festival. Joshua Zucker is the cofounder and math director of the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festivals. In 2006, he
helped begin the Math Teacher’s Circle project at the American Institute of
Mathematics. Joshua’s work with math circles began in 1998 and he is now working
with at least half a dozen different ones around the Bay area. He holds a Masters
Degree in Mathematics from Stanford University. Joshua was also a member of the
U.S. Sudoku Team at the World Sudoku Championships.
We conducted electronic surveys that were customized for each of the groups: Students, Teachers,
and Volunteers. Students used either their phones or the available laptops at the Festival to take the
survey. Teachers and Volunteers were emailed their surveys after the Festival.
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Out of 148 students who attended, we received 112 unique responses. The results were as follows:
The student population included about 38% Native Americans, and 47% Hispanic.
75 out of 112 students reported that the Festival activities were Awesome or close to Awesome.
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85 out of 112 students reported that the Festival overall was Awesome or close to Awesome.
Unedited student survey responses:
“this Festival worked out my brain pretty good now its time for it to kick back and chill”
“The art involve with math brought my artistic skills to enjoy math. I learned that math can be fun
involving creativity! :)”
“It was awesome”
“I think everything was amazing”
“i loved it here”
“the way you gather up is amazing , and how you've decided to set this up , also the variety was
amazing.”
“This was an amazing experience!”
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Quotes from the table leaders who seemed to have enjoyed this Festival as much as the
students:
“The students who made it to the last question really felt rewarded for their efforts.”
“Most of them stayed for at least 15-20 min. Some stayed more than an hour.” (This refers to one
activity)
“I liked how they could spend as long, or as little, as they wanted.”
“I was surprised that we had groups come together to the table and after awhile even though some
wanted to leave, others would stay.”
“One student actually wrote down all the different scenarios and came up with different patterns.”
“One group worked all the way through the 9 questions. They came up with patterns i hadn't noticed.”
“Some got hooked and lost track of time.”
“I was impressed with students that seemed frustrated with the activity but continued to work through
it.”
“Very surprised when a couple of students who were not engaged, became engaged after they fully
understood how the wolves moved”
“They were not afraid to play on a gameboard with triangles instead of squares.”
“most kids, once they understood what to do, jumped right into it and started making rectangles.”
“It was difficult to stand by and watch them struggle but it was interesting to see the outcomes from
the different groups of students. I watched some students overcome and persevere with the activity
and also watched some students take a look at the activity and decide it was not for them.”
Quotes from teachers:
“They (my students) told me it was difficult and challenging, but a lot of fun.”
“(My students) Loved being able to think outside of the box.”
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Festival Summary
This Festival was intended to expose the students to the fun of mathematics and to grow the interest
of local math teachers in these types of activities. An additional benefit of such a Festival is to engage
the community of STEM advocates, educators, and potential mentors directly with students in a
productive environment for mentorship. Teachers and chaperones also got a chance to experience
the joy of Math Circles activities as a special two-hour session with our special guest Josh Zucker.
We hope that teachers will use Math Circle activities in their schools.
Three training sessions were conducted in the week before the Festival to train volunteers on how to
be table leaders and on how to run their assigned activity. Being a table leader does not presuppose
mastery of the table’s activity, but rather having a sense of the struggles students will encounter. This
involves the table leaders actually doing their table’s activity as a group during their pre-Festival
training. Crucially, Table Leaders must learn how to be less helpful! This means learning when not to
step in and explain what to do so that the students can experience “funstration” or productive
struggle.
Our Festival volunteers were affiliated with a variety of groups in Santa Fe and Northern NM
including: AAUW of Santa Fe, Flow Science Inc. , IBM, LANL, Mathamuseum, Math Teacher Circle,
New Mexico Environment Department , New Mexico Highlands University, New Mexico MESA, Q’tZ
Animation , Santa Fe Community College, (students, faculty, and staff), Santa Fe Public Schools,
Simtable, SMA, UNM Valencia, and many other retired and active STEM professionals.
By giving those volunteers exposure to a Julia Robinson Math Festival and by association Math
Circles, we hope to see more professionals of the Northern New Mexico community involved in STEM
education.
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A Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival as an introduction to Math Circles
A Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival (JRMF) can be a way of introducing large numbers of
students, teachers, STEM educators and the larger education community to Math Circles.
“Math Circles bring K-12 students or K-12 mathematics teachers together with mathematically
sophisticated leaders in an informal setting, after school or on weekends, to work on
interesting problems or topics in mathematics. The Circles combine significant content with a
setting that encourages a sense of discovery and excitement about mathematics through
problem solving and interactive exploration. Ideal problems are low-threshold, high-ceiling;
they offer a variety of entry points and can be approached with minimal mathematical
background, but lead to deep mathematical concepts and can be connected to advanced
mathematics.”
(https://www.mathcircles.org/Wiki_WhatIsAMathCircle)
A math circle can be run at any level—from K-12 to adults (teachers, mathematicians, parents, etc.).
This does not mean that the problems are easy, even for younger students. They are certainly not. In
general, problems will start from an easily grasped place—perhaps involving some physical object or
manipulative—and build to a more generalized understanding of the area of mathematics involved.
For example, we might begin with a pile of candy, and distribute it in some way among five students
(conference participants) at a table. Then we would have them share the candy in some regular
pattern several different ways, with each new way helping them to discover something about the
significance of the number of candies and candy sharers across the system. Or perhaps tables of
students will be give strips of paper with numbers on them, then be told something as vague as
“organize them.” The circle leader will do his or her best to not be too helpful. This math circle process
is about discovery and invention—constructing mathematics from our innate (and teachable) ability to
perceive patterns.
Who is Julia Robinson?
Julia Robinson, a pioneer among American women in mathematics, was the first woman elected to
the mathematical section of the National Academy of Sciences and the first woman to become
president of the American Mathematical Society. She was a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley
for many years and is especially known for her work in solving Hi|bert’s Tenth Problem. The Julia
Robinson Mathematics Festivals began in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007 to honor her legacy
and to encourage more students to pursue mathematics. The Festivals have since expanded to other
cities around the world.
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Concluding Thoughts:
When we opened the pre-registration for this Festival, within two weeks and with minimal advertising,
16 teachers from all over Northern NM signed up wanting to bring a total of over 700 students. Due to
space restrictions, we had to limit ourselves to accepting around 165 students. The teachers,
students and adult volunteers who participated in the Festival gave us very positive feedback and
seem to enjoy this event and want to participate again. Clearly there is overwhelming demand for
activities such as the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival, and we hope to bring this Festival back
next year - maybe even more than once a year.
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