During the first two weeks of school this year, BAMM had the opportunity of participating on the January term at Metro Early College Middle School. The Metro Early College Schools were born out of a partnership between OSU and Battelle to create a STEM school. At Metro Middle School, J term is time that allows for both extension and remediation, all personalized to the needs of each student. Students who master a subject have an opportunity to take an extension class in J-term. We were invited to teach one of these elective extension class for advanced math students.

We chose a different topic for each week and taught a daily period of 1.5 hours. The first week we talked about tesselations. Students started exploring tesselations with regular shapes, first using a single shapes and then mixing them. They also studied tesselations with nonregular triangles and quadrilaterals. We challenged them to find pentagons that could tesselate and were surprised to see them come up with a couple of families of them.

The second week was about Mathmagic, something the students were really looking forward to. Each day, we performed one or two tricks in front of them and then challenged them to unveil the tricks. At first they would always say that the trick was obvious and really easy, but upon trying to perform it themselves, they would realize that it was not as simple as they first thought. However, sometimes with a hint, most of them were eventually able to uncover it.

Through these engaging magic tricks, students practiced or learned mathematics ranging from multiplication tables to topology, passing through algebra and number systems. We very much enjoyed the experience and were amazed at these students ability with math. I wouldn’t be surprised that some of them ended up going for a career in math.