Session Style: Problem Posing

Racial Profiling

To investigate situations in the real world, we sometimes create a mathematical model. A mathematical model is a simplified version of the real world that allows us to understand the real world a little better. Over time we can change this model so that it gets closer and closer to the real world. Today we are going to create a mathematical model that represents a police officer pulling over a car randomly to try and gain an understanding of a police officer conducting a traffic stop. Our essential question is “Do police officers disproportionately pull over Black, Hispanic, or minority...

Liar’s Bingo

From recognizing a pattern to generating terms, to abstracting and making inferences, tasks based on patterns embody the “low-threshold, high-ceiling” trait of good problems. Liar’s Bingo is all about patterns. This session involves recognizing patterns and searching for underlying structure, number theory, numeration, and potentially binary arithmetic. Sometimes, as in the game of Liar’s Bingo, order seems to arise magically from something we first assume to be random or chaotic. In this case, we use the game of Liar’s Bingo to engage participants’ desire to find patterns, and supercharge that desire by demonstrating a magic trick that captivates attention by...

Optimal Locations of Firehouses (Taxi-cab Metric)

This session asks participants to expand their notion of “distance,” using a nontraditional taxicab metric instead of the usual Pythagorean notion. Participants are guided to construct the equivalent of “circles” with this new metric and to look at the intersections of multiple such circles. In particular, two firehouses in Gridtown are a certain distance apart and at specific addresses. What firehouse should serve a given house with a specified address? What areas of town should each firehouse serve? What if there were three firehouses? The focus of the session is on a deeper understanding of the coordinate system and notions...

Piece of Cake; Delectable Fractions and Decimals

Pick’s Theorem

Puzzles, Bands, and Knots

Quilt While You’re Ahead

Recruiting Change for a Dollar

Semiregular Tilings

Can you find all possible semiregular tilings of the plane? A tiling of the plane covers the (infinite) plane, without gaps or overlaps, using congruent copies of one or more shapes. A semiregular tiling is a tiling of the plane with certain constraints: two or more regular polygons are used, polygons meet edge-to-edge, and the pattern of polygons around every vertex is the same. Questions about polygonal tilings of the plane can utilize a classical area of mathematics to highlight and connect middle and high school mathematics content standards, mathematical practices, and the nuanced nature of mathematical justification. This session...

Shifting Gears: Approximations in Cycling