Starting Monday, I have been in a math camp called SIM camp set up by the University of Illinois. There are two camps hosted by this group of people every year, the one for younger students is Epsilon and the older students go to Delta. The first day of the camp was majorly introductions, icebreakers, and how to use the various technologies that we would use throughout the camp. Because of the pandemic that is happening around us, they had to do an online camp, instead of an in-person one. Therefore, some of the things that they had planned didn’t go as expected, but most of the things so far have gone pretty smoothly. After all of the introductions, we finally got to do the curriculum. First, we made Mobius bands which show that there are 3d shapes with only one side that aren’t a line. That was my personal favorite thing of the day. On the second day, we got more into the actual math and not just talking to each other. My favorite part of this day was learning about the mathematicians that we don’t necessarily talk about in our history classes. It drove home the point that mathematicians don’t have to be old, dead, rich white men. The first part of the day is called counting to infinity + 1, and the second part is called How To Draw Algebra. The first one is more general math, while the second is more focused on constructions.
That’s all for now, but I will keep posting about this camp as I have only been in two of the 5 days that we signed up for. Stay tuned!