Math Circle - Content Choices

Content Choices

Decision about content are difficult for newly forming math circles and clubs, or for parents seeking groups for their children.

Project-based clubs may spend a few meetings building origami, developing a math trail in their town, or programming a mathy computer game together. Math-rich projects may be artistic, exploratory, applied to sciences, executable (software-based), business-oriented, or directed at real contributions to local communities. Museums, cultural and business clubs, tech groups, online networks, artists/musicians/actors active in the community, and other individual professionals can make math projects especially real and meaningful. Increasingly, math clubs invite remote participation of active people (authors, community leaders, professionals) through webinar and teleconferencing software.

Problem-solving circles get together to pose and solve interesting, deep, meaningful math problems. Problems considered "good" are easy to pose, challenging to solve, require connections among several concepts and techniques, and lead to significant math ideas. Best problem solving practices include meta-cognition (managing memory and attention), grouping problems by type and conceptual connections (e.g. "river crossing problems"), moving between more general and abstract problems and particular, simpler examples, and collaboration with other club members, with current online communities, and with past mathematicians through the media they contributed to the culture.

Research mathematicians and connecting students with them can be a focus of math circles. Students in these circles appreciate and start to attain the very special way of thinking in research mathematics, such as generalizing problems, continue asking deeper questions, seeing similarities across different examples and so on.

Topic-centered clubs follow math themes, such as clock arithmetic, fractals, or linearity. Club members write and read essays, pose and solve problems, create and study definitions, build interesting example spaces, and investigate applications of their current topic. There are lists of time-tested, classic math club topics, especially rich in connections and accessible to a wide range of abilities. The plus of using a classic topic is the variety of resources available from the past; however, bringing a relatively obscure or new topic to the attention of the club and the global community is very rewarding, as well.

Applied math clubs center on a field other than mathematics, such as math for thespians, computer programming math, or musical math. Such clubs need strong leadership both for the math parts and for the other field part. Such clubs can meet at an artists' studio, at a game design company, at a theater or another authentic professional setting. More examples of fruitful applied math pathways include history, storytelling, art, inventing and tinkering, toy and game design, robotics, origami, and natural sciences.

Most circles and clubs mix some features of the above types. For example, the Metroplex Math Circle has a combination of problem-solving and research, and the New York Math Circle is some combination of a problem-solving circle and a topic-centered club, with vestiges of a research circle.

One can expect problem-solving groups to attract kids already strong in math and confident in their math abilities. On the other hand, math anxious kids will be more likely to try project-based or applied clubs. Topic-centered clubs typically work with kids who can all work at about the same level. The decision about the type of the club strongly depends on your target audience.