What's New at BEAM?
It's everyone's favorite field trip! On Monday, July 25, the whole BEAM team headed to Six Flags New England for a day of roller coasters, bumper cars, and shopping for super hero capes! After a full (and hot!) day at the park, we headed to Friendly's for dinner and then back to campus. Here are some favorite photos of the day:
On Monday, July 18, the whole group (Vassar and Bard students, too!) went to Splashdown Beach for a fun water park day (even if it was shortened by the rain!). Here are some photos of our day!
On Tuesday, it was Crystal's turn! She turned 13, so we celebrated with her favorite: chocolate cupcakes and Oreo's. Happy birthday, Crystal!
How do strong mathematicians think? How do they work? That's the goal of our problem solving classes at BEAM!
At the beginning of the program, students got to choose between Solving Big Problems and Math Team Strategies. In Math Team Strategies, the goal is to prepare for math competitions, like MATHCOUNTS, the AMC 8, or Purple Comet. Math competitions and math teams praise clever, efficient thinking, finding solutions and shortcuts that save time and still make mathematical sense!
In class, students were working on problems like the following one, combining their knowledge of geometry and number theory:
And here are the students hard at work, trying to break the problem down and explain their solution.
We take birthdays seriously at BEAM! On Saturday, we wished a happy 13th birthday to Alex and celebrated with his favorite flavor -- red velvet whoopie pies! Happy birthday, Alex!
For the lounge every year, we design staff and student faceboards, to help people keep track of all the members of the BEAM staff. Meet the BEAM 2016 Vassar staff:
And here are the BEAM 2016 Vassar students!
We are going to have a great summer!
Can you answer these problems?
In combinatorics, students learn to count without counting. Sure, you can count all the ways to make a word re-arranging the letters in the word cat. But can you count all the ways to do it with goat? Zebra? Monkey? In this class, students learn clever ways to account for every answer, without under or over counting. Nice work, students!
How do you start math camp? With getting to know you games!
At Vassar, our students played the following:
Here's some photos of them getting to know each other!
