Dear youcubians,
I wanted to share with you the past 4 weeks of our summer math camp with students from two local school districts that was nothing short of amazing. I won’t ever forget the connections we made with students and teachers. Eighty-seven 6th and 7th grade students, many of them underachieving and disillusioned with math, 4 teachers, 3 Stanford graduate students, 1 staff member and 12 Stanford undergraduates came together to make a 4 week summer camp a memorable math time for everyone.
I am sharing a short music video we made that I really think you will love. I do – except the part where my undergrads made me rap!! I hope this will get you pumped up and excited for the new school year. I know our camp students are ready to get back to class and be leaders for math education.
We will be sharing our lessons from camp in a few weeks. The students took math class with the teachers in the mornings and explored math around campus in the afternoons with my undergraduates. You will see from the video that the lessons combined inquiry based math tasks with mindset messages that were powerful for the students. Our mornings were spent on challenging math, including some of my favorite algebraic quadratic tasks. Our students really enjoyed working on the open and difficult math. When they took standardized math tests at the end of the camp they had improved by an incredible 50% on average, in only 4 weeks. We used our own Week of Inspirational Math activities. If you haven’t checked out our five WIM lessons you can find them here.
Please share our camp video with everyone who enjoys watching kids sing, dance and rap about math. We want to show the world how inspiring inquiry based math is to students and celebrate math education!
Viva La Revolution,
Jo & the youcubed team