εpsilon talk

Musings on math and education. Made with love by the Washington Student Math Association.

Upcoming Math Mania 2016 + A Look Back at Math Mania 2015

WSMA is hosting the 6th annual Math Mania on Saturday, June 11th, 2016! Math Mania is a family-friendly, interactive problem-solving event with stations, fun problems, and fantastic prizes.

This year, Math Mania is having stations with three categories of varied difficulty to accommodate students of all levels. In increasing difficulty, the stations are hands-on games, logic, and finally optimization problems.

Here’s a sample problem from last year:

Problem 3: Mr. and Mrs. Brown have 2 children that are 7 and 4 years old respectively. You know that at least one of the children is a boy. What is the probability that both of them are boys?

Interesting, isn’t it?

Last year, we hosted Math Mania in the Bellevue Square Mall. We created a scavenger hunt with stations set at Microsoft, Legos, and Disney stores, with logic, geometry, and optimization problems at each station. At the end, we awarded students who attempted to solve problems with prizes like notebooks and water bottles sponsored by Microsoft and other companies.

Here’s a look back at the day of Math Mania 2015.

The event began in a room provided by the Microsoft Store in Bellevue Square. We presented a slideshow on WSMA related events and resources. You can see our event calendar here and find other great math resources on our website.

Microsoft Store sponsored us with some great prizes for a raffle, including water bottles and duffle bags. All participants of the event were given raffle tickets for a chance to win these prizes.

We had many families engaged in solving puzzles and problems, not only at the Microsoft Store station, but also at other stations throughout the mall.

In additional to raffle prizes, we also had a prize table with prizes for kids who solved a number of problems. We had may fun prizes, including T-shirts, notebooks, pens, and candy.

Math Mania stations could be found at various locations in the mall. Just look for blue-shirted WSMA members!

The most rewarding part of the event was seeing the families and students engaged in problem solving, while having a great time.

Math Mania 2015 was a great success! We hope to see all of you attend this year at the same location on June 11th! Until then, stay tuned for more updates.