On Friday, April 9thth the Swanton School hosted St. Michael’s College Professor of Mathematics, Joanna Ellis- Monaghan. Professor Ellis-Monaghan was brought to Swanton by Math Content Specialist Beth Hunter as part of the Expanding Horizons program, a project of the Vermont State Mathematics Coalition which brings college professors to middle and high schools free of charge. She presented a workshop on Networking and Graph Theory to students from Swanton as part of the FNWSU STEM 4E program.
Graph Theory is about the way things are connected to each other. Leonard Euler, an eighteenth century mathematician, first used this type of math. Today, this type of math is used in many places such as in computers, electronics, airplanes, cars, cell phones, medicines, social networks and space flights.
Students were introduced to graph explorations that they could do together. Students drew dots (vertices), connected by lines (edges), resulting in a network or graph. They took turns labeling the vertices with different colors, not placing a color on any vertex that is adjacent to the same color. Students tried to find the least amount of colors to use. They also explored what happened as the number of vertices drawn was an odd or an even number of vertices.
Kindergarten class visited Claudette & Alex Carswell’s Sugar House. We made a maple number book and we did a sugaring problem solving piece.
By Beth Hunter, Swanton Schools Math Content Specialist
Dr. George Ashline, professor of mathematics at St. Michaels College, is pictured here with students and teachers from the Swanton, Highgate and Franklin schools.
On Thursday, March 18th, Dr. George Ashline, Department Chairperson of the Mathematics Department at St. Michael’s College, presented a workshop on statistics to elementary students from Swanton, Highgate and Franklin. Dr. Ashline is a participant of the Expanding Horizons program which brings college professors to the elementary and high schools free of charge. The Swanton School hosted this initiative as part of the FNWSU STEM 4E project, which the public can find out more about through their website at www.mathiseverywhere.org.
Dr. Ashline had the students collect their own data by asking them to respond to a set of questions including “who plays soccer?”, “who lives in Highgate?”, “what is your favorite subject”, etc. Those students grouped themselves together and were timed on how fast they could do the “wave.” Excitement mounted as each group of students tried to beat the time of the group before them. After ten sets of data were collected, the students built a graph or scatter plot to display their findings. The “older” teachers, who were very slow compared to the students, set an outlier for the data set.
Students then were asked to analyze the graph they had created. They discussed the strength and correlation between the number of people and the time, as well as how to examine the cluster of points to recognize the correlation
coefficient, which is a value between negative and positive one.
Dr. Ashline ended his workshop by introducing a computer game which can be accessed from home. The website is http://www.stat.uiuc.edu/courses/stat100/cuwu/Games.html He challenged students to practice and get a higher score than his college students.
Sixth graders from the Swanton School participate in the “wave” in order to obtain statistics to create their scatter plots.
Michael Beckett, an IBM engineer, works with Kaitlyn Boudreau, Colby Hakey, Livia Yergeau and Tanner Clippinger to build snap circuits.
On Friday, March 12th engineers from IBM visited Swanton Schools’ fifth and sixth grade classes to introduce them to activities supporting the math and science in
Dylan LaPlante blows on his pin wheel in hopes that he created one which will be strong enough to withstand the wind energy exerted on it.
engineering. The effort was part of IBM’s Discover “E” program and was coordinated by Michael Beckett from IBM’s Systems and Technology Group and Beth Hunter, Swanton’s Math Content Specialist.
Activities included Wind Energy (A form of solar energy caused by the uneven heating of the atmosphere by the sun, irregularities of the earth’s surface and rotation of the earth.), Polymers Matter (A long chain of many molecules of the same type connected together by molecular bonds.) and Snap Circuits.
(L to R) Greg Stell, Cami Hayes and Chasity Bricker investigate the properties of matter with the Polymers activity.
Arrays are a “hands on” way of helping students understand and use multiplication. This video shows a third grade student who has created an array. In the video, he uses math language to describe the array. At first he uses counting by one’s, a less efficient strategy. When a teacher reminds him, he quickly uses “skip counting” to calculate the number of squares in the array and tells the principal that 12×3=36.
Answers:
#1. 34
#2. ¼
#3. 16
