High school students from several surrounding schools, including Central, Delta and Plateau Valley, gathered at Colorado Mesa University on Thursday for the 2019 Math Extravaganza. The event was run by CMU’s own professors, as well as CMU students in math fields.
Math Extravaganza launched with Acting Vice President of Academic Affairs, Kurt Haas, welcoming the high schoolers and stating that the idea of the event was to explore numeracy, the math equivalent of literacy.
According to Assistant Professor of Mathematics Eric Miles, the idea of Math Extravaganza was to “excite them about the world of math and computer science, statistics, to show them that there’s a whole lot more to this world than maybe what they’ve seen before and to just peak their interest [and] have fun.”
The event began with the students splitting into three groups to rotate through three stations, each of which lasted forty minutes. The first station was an activity in which the students flipped coins to get statistics on how often they landed on each side. Later, they altered the statistics by keeping the data of one of two coin flips for each trial.
The second station was a “math escape room,” which wasn’t so much a literal room than groups around tables, trying to solve puzzles involving cards with irregular shapes, paper boxes with combination padlocks and pieces of transparent plastic on which the students could trace with markers.
The third station dealt with computer science, allowing students to sit at computers set up around the room and use Python for basic computing tasks.
Following the stations, the high school students ate lunch and went on a campus tour. Then, at 1:30, Associate Professor of Physics Dr. Jared Workman gave a keynote presentation on “Physics as a pathway towards STEM employment.”
Math Extravaganza was concluded with name drawings and prizes.
