In NYC, we’re piloting an exciting new part of Saturday classes: advisory periods!

On Saturdays this fall, our NYC Program Team began offering 45-minute blocks for BEAM high schoolers in between morning and afternoon classes. Since BEAM’s high school students already receive 3 hours of advanced math instruction every Saturday, these advisory blocks are meant to provide the necessary enrichment that falls outside of advanced math: enrichment that centers on STEM access, exploration, and community.

It was a packed fall for BEAM students in New York and LA! They learned to code in Python and studied number theory, participated in a Math Wrangle, attended college applications workshops, dissected oysters from the Bronx River, toured UC Irvine, and much more! 

Keep reading for a closer look at some of the fun, math-filled activities our BEAM students got up to last fall! 

Finding the area of a square or a circle is simple — right? This Pi Day, we encourage you to test your mathematical skills by solving the following five area problems (a few of which were featured with the Pi Day card)! If you think the first four problems are easy, then try your hand at the Bonus Challenge: Infinite Circles. 

Hint: In the spirit of Pi Day, you will be using π in most (if not all) of your solutions. Good luck!

The Mandelbrot Set is one of the most famous images in mathematics. Even if you never studied much math, there's a good chance this looks familiar.

The Mandelbrot Set is a fractal, which means it has a repeating pattern to it. No matter how much you zoom in, the same kind of complex structure recurs. But where does it come from? And what could it possibly have to do with 𝜋?

Everyone learns about place value in school. The ones place, the tens place, the hundreds place… it all seems so boring! It's just memorizing, right?!?

As usual, though, when you think deeply about a topic, you discover hidden depths. For this year's set of holiday problems, I looked for place value problems because I wanted to show that even with something you learn in elementary school, there are still interesting problems to do and more to discover. Let's have some fun with this!

Summer is a special time at BEAM, when hundreds of middle schoolers from New York City and Los Angeles attend BEAM camps to dive into advanced mathematics. This past summer, BEAM campers built strong, lasting communities, grew their problem-solving skills, and deepened their love and appreciation for math. 

“It was like a dream,” said Ruby, a student who attended BEAM Summer Away at Marist University. “All the activities BEAM offers are so, so great. And the math is like the strong knot that brought the students and staff here together.”