Four Brown County Intermediate School students spent a week living and learning at Ball State University this summer.
Only 56 Indiana fifth- and sixth-grade students were invited to attend the “Big M” Math Camp for gifted math students in Muncie. They spent a week staying in a college dorm and participating in math activities.
Brown County Intermediate School students were nominated by math teachers Pam Lucas and Mitzi Garman.
Topics they studied included patterns in numbers, problem solving, logic and reasoning along with topics from probability and statistics.
Chase Austin, 6th grade
Q: What did you enjoy learning most at camp?
A: I enjoyed learning about and making the platonic solids the most. My favorite one to make was the dodecahedron. I also really enjoyed playing Equate, a math version of Scrabble.
Q: What do you like most about math?
A: My favorite part of math is order of operations because I like to solve problems that involve computation.
Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A: When I grow up I want to be a civil engineer.
Brock Bragg, 6th grade
Q: Why did you want to go to math camp?
A: I had never been to camp before and thought this would be a fun opportunity. I wanted to stay on a college campus doing something I like (math). I wanted to see how I compared to other students from Indiana in my math. I wanted to see what I needed to work on or did not know yet. I wanted to learn something new.
Q: What did you enjoy learning most at camp?
A: I enjoyed learning about all of the different platonic solids. I learned new words like hexahedron and tetrahedron. I enjoy still quizzing my family on things I learned to see if they know them. I like to give them math problems.
Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A: I want to be a baseball player in MLB. I use math in baseball currently to figure my stats like my batting average, walk and strike-out percentage and RBIs.
Savannah Oden, 6th grade
Q: What did you enjoy learning most at camp?
A: One of my favorite math activities was when we used paper strips to create the great stellated dodecahedra in two dimensions that would “ fold up” into the shape in three-dimensional form.
Q: What is your favorite subject? What do you like most about math?
A: My favorite subject is science. It is challenging and fun. My favorite part about math is algebra.
Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A: When I grow up I either want to be an FBI agent, an author or an engineer. All of those are important jobs and I want to make a difference in the world! Some of the problems facing society that I want to solve when I grow up include: pollution, ice caps melting and creating additional energy resources to help preserve our non-renewable energy resources. I would want these additional energy resources to be green, clean and free or at least affordable to everyone.
Milly Patrick, 6th grade
Q: What did you enjoy learning most at camp?
A: There was more geometry than anything. I liked learning about tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedrons, which are all 3-D shapes.
Q: What is your favorite subject? What do you like most about math?
A: My favorite subject is math, believe it or not, and what I like about math is that you can do so many interesting things with the same numbers and shapes and it turns into something completely different.
Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?
A: When I grow up, I’d love to be a professional volleyball player. I love volleyball and as of right now I have volleyball practice Monday through Thursday and sometimes Fridays for three hours. It is a lot of work, but it is my favorite thing to do!
