Burke’s Students’ Adventures in Math

GAIM Is working on enhancing the competition experience for 2023 and this year issued a single 16-question challenge to invite as wide as possible group of students into the competition. GAIM is meant to be a team competition and collaboration is allowed and encouraged! Burke’s had nine groups of Upper School students grouped by grade level, and scheduled practice time around busy extracurricular schedules.

 

An exciting benefit of the broader challenge was the increase in new students joining competition veterans from last year’s Zoom competition. Students were also glad to switch from working together only in Zoom breakout rooms to an in-person experience as they worked through the problems this year. 

 

The GAIM challenge was an excellent opportunity for students to practice their teamwork and leadership skills. Each team of up to 4 students had a captain, who was in charge of keeping time, dividing up work, and settling disagreements. Although Upper School Math Specialist Ms. Goldstein was on hand to moderate, students couldn’t ask faculty for help and had to work together to design their problem-solving strategies. Some teams would split up the problems among themselves, with one to two students working on four problems at a time, then trade once they’d completed them. Other teams assigned two students to each problem and presented the results to their larger group.

 

In addition the math problem solving, GAIM chooses four historical figures every year to include in their challenges. The women they choose can be from any time during history, as long as they worked in STEM. To see who they chose this year, check out their website. 

 

“It was a good experience to have. It was good to learn about people [like Zhenyi Wang, an astronomer, and poet in sixteenth-century Nanjing, China].” - Laila A.