Community of Adult Math Instructors (CAMI)
teachers learning math together
My friends,
I want to say thank you and goodbye for now. I’m taking a break from adult education for the rest of this year. I’ll be traveling and exploring other interests for a while. Starting in May 2025, my wife Alex and I will be biking from Vancouver, CA to San Diego. I’ll be posting photos and stories from the road at @eappleton on Instagram and birdfruit.wordpress.com.
Continue reading “Goodbye for now”Cindy Aossey and Dee Crescitelli started the session with a notice and wonder about two graphs.
Inspired by the hit TV show The Queen’s Gambit, we tackled a chess puzzle in February’s evening meeting. Sophie shared a problem from one of Alex Bellos’s recent Monday Math Puzzles. Here it is:
Before we went into our breakout rooms, we spent a bit of time clarifying the ways that a Queen can move on the board, and making sure we agreed about which squares were “unattacked” or “safe.” (We had some debate about the square that the Queen is sitting on. In the end, we decided that this was not a safe square.)
Check out the Jamboard to see some of the work we did (or don’t, if you don’t want any spoilers!) One question we found intriguing was, “how do you know when you’ve found the best answer?”
Since then, many of us have been playing chess on chess.com. We’re even thinking about starting a CAMI chess club. Want to play? Send us a message and we’ll loop you in.
In the December evening meeting, Amy Vickers led us through a new exploration that was loosely inspired by last month’s meeting on some circles.
As a warm-up, Amy presented us with this question: Why might a manhole cover (or, in the gender-neutral, maintenance cover) be round? One of the central ideas that came up in the resulting discussion was that a circle won’t fall through its own hole, no matter which way you turn it. It has a constant diameter, or constant width.
We started with a quick game of online Simon Says.
It was okay, but a little clunky. Usha suggested a different kind of activity where video on means yes and video off means no. Read a series of statements. Here are a few I brainstormed: Winter is my favorite season of the year. I love ice cream. I am excited to be back in school. I want to go to college. (You probably have better examples.) End with a statement everyone can say yes to…
Continue reading “Rainbow Squares”For November’s evening meeting, Eric led us through an interesting exploration of past and present methods of determining how many congressional seats to apportion to states of various populations.
The meeting began with the following warm up:
An adult education program is hiring 37 teachers to teach at 3 different sites. Each teacher can work at one site only.
Site A: 1500 students/year
Site B: 1000 students/year
Site C: 100 students/year
How many teachers should go to each site?
Continue reading “Apportionment Math!”How are elections won and how would different voting methods affect the outcomes? For the September evening meeting, Usha led us through an exploration of the math behind elections.
What if a few simple rules governed all life on earth? Audrey brought John Conway’s Game of Life to April’s evening CAMI meeting.
Below is an intro video to the Game of Life.
Audrey introduced the group to a classic problem from optimal stopping theory (whatever that is). 🙂
If you’re on the search for a new secretary, how would you choose who to hire? For June’s evening CAMI meeting, Audrey shared a classic problem with the group:
There are N applicants for a secretarial position. The applicants are interviewed in random order, and you must accept or reject a candidate immediately after interviewing them.
After you reject someone, there is no way to bring them back.
There is only one position available. So as soon as you accept a candidate, you’re done. What strategy should you use in order to maximize the likelihood of hiring the best candidate out of the N applicants?
Some of the assumptions we used when exploring the problem:
In this meeting, Steve challenged us to figure out the best of some bad choices at the casino.
Steve started today’s meeting by sharing that he had recently noticed that the Tropicana Casino in Atlantic City has a game called the Cash Wheel. Steve took notes on what he saw and presented us with a representation of the Cash Wheel. Continue reading “Tropicana Cash Wheel”
