We started the day with a cognitive puzzles medley, giving students an opportunity to choose the order they solved the puzzles. To encourage collaboration, students were introduced to research on the study habits of university students taking advanced mathematics courses. Students who formed study groups spent less time completing their work and struggled less because the group’s study partners were able to fill in each other’s ability gaps and lend their strengths to each other, all the while turning learning into a core social event of the day, minimizing loneliness and failure rates. Likewise, SAVY students were encouraged to collaborate in learning and benefit from each other’s strengths. For the fun part, after completing each puzzle, students had an option to build a paper airplane or any other flying paper contraption and try to fly it into a box at the center of the room from ordered vantage points to earn a marble of their choice. Needless to say, we had many marvelous contraptions made that zoomed all over the classroom.

From cognitive puzzles and epic flying machines, we moved onto “The Magic Numbers” with Hannah Fry, exploring the mathematical patterns in music, patterns in math as ancient Greeks saw them, and Platonic solids in the unseen world of math and inside the structures of viruses. From Hannah Fry and her quest to find out whether math was invented or discovered, we jumped to “The Story of Maths” with Marcus du Sautoy. The acquired knowledge allowed us to hold a classroom discussion covering the following questions: Do we see mathematical patterns in nature because they are there or because it is all that our brain allows us to recognize? Are we inclined to see systems and patterns in the world around us? How does human creativity work? Students also had an opportunity to further develop their Number Systems, add on to their Researcher’s Notebooks and Concept Maps, and share their findings with other groups via Questions and Ideas Gallery Walk Wall.

Questions of the day to share: