The girls were all up earlier. One group took a bus from a tiny town somewhere in the rural south; they left at 2:00 in the morning. Others were up at 4:30 or 5:00 am. My 8 am departure was not noteworthy.
Why were they all up early? Over 1000 of them this year?
The program is called Expanding Your Horizons, and is part of a national effort, first started in San Francisco in 1974, to encourage girls to study math, science, and engineering. The national website proclaims that such conferences are now held in 31 states. In our case, girls from all over the state, and even the native Americans in the northern part of the adjacent state, come to the University of All People (UAP) and spend the morning attending workshops of their choice in one of 45 different areas, learning about possible careers and opportunities in science, engineering, health care. The math workshop has never been the most popular, but we had about 55 girls total come through, and each one built a couple of cool fractals.
One thing I did right this year was invite one of the other female faculty members from Good Old Dude University to help me out. Not only was Dr E interested in helping, she wanted to come up with the main presentation. She hadn't done anything like it before, but knew it would be a great learning experience. I was in the same place in 2006 in Texas, invited to run a general-audience workshop, and finally ready to put in the time to come up with something fun and related to my research.
Dr E's research area involves applications of fractals to applied problems, and she found a few fun activities for the girls involving paper triangles, marshmallows, and toothpicks. The girls loved it. As they assembled their creations, they pulled out their phones to take pictures of the final projects, which looked something like this:
And like this:
(Neither image is of our kids or their projects, they're both pictures from the Fractal Foundation, in New Mexico. But you get the idea.)
It was really fun to wander the sides of the room as the TA this year, helping to pass out papers, scissors, supplies, answer questions, and clean up in between sessions, but to leave the presentation to Dr E. Last year, and the year before, and the year before, I did all of it alone. Much less fun.
And one of the best things ... Dr E mentioned saving some of the presentation supplies so she could do this again next year....
It is nice to volunteer, but nicer to volunteer with nice people.
1 comment:
I see the large triangle fractal and all I can think is: quilt.
Actually I did a math workshop with some impacted youth many years ago when I was substitute teaching; they had to learn about angles and measurements and how shapes fit into each other (making paper quilt blocks in the process), but nothing as cool as fractals. Wish I would have had you for a teacher. Or TA.
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