Announcements
"Save the World Through Science & Engineering” Video Contest - The Kavli Foundation is challenging Grades 6-12 students across the world to brainstorm and share their ideas!
Accept the Biology Challenge: Become part of the USA Biology Olympiad
The USA Biology Olympiad (USABO) is the premiere US biology competition for high school students at http://www.usabo-trc.org.
Annual National STEM Video Game Challenge for Students and K–12 Teachers
is now open for entries and is accepting submissions of original video game concepts and designs from students and educators in four categories – middle school, high school, collegiate, and educator. Deadline: March 12, 2012.
April 27-29, 2012
USA Science and Engineering Festival
The 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival will inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers with school programs and nationwide contests throughout the 2011/2012 school year and a finale Expo in Washington DC on April 27-29, 2012. JMU is a Titanium Sponsor of the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
Grade 5-12 STEM Education Program Opportunity for School District and School Communities
An 8-week experiment design competition in the community, held Spring 2012, will allow grade 5-12 student teams to design real microgravity experiments vying for their community’s reserved mini-lab slot on ISS.
Spotlight
M3: Mentoring for Minorities in Mathematics
Dr. Anthony Tongen is an Assistant Professor at James Madison University. His responsibilities include teaching, research and service to the department, University, and community.
For the past three summers, Dr. Tongen received grant money for M3: Mentoring for Minorities in Mathematics, which is part of the National Research Experience for Undergraduates Program (NREUP) funded by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences (NSF-DMS), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Moody's Foundation (they ceased funding this project in 2009). Internal funding from the College of Science and Math, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Office for Diversity at James Madison University was also received.
The focus of the summer 2009 M3 research project was Mancala, an ancient family of board games popular in Africa and Asia. While there are many possible rule variants, this 'sowing' type game is based on moving stone seeds from one container to others according to prescribed deterministic rules. Play can be surprisingly involved, with a large number of legal moves possible each turn. Surprisingly, there has been little published mathematical research of this very interesting game. John Conway developed his own variant, 'Sowing,' which led to some simple mathematical language and structure which could be further developed. The primary research question for this project was "Is there an optimal strategy, against which no other competing strategy can win." Mancala has been played for more than ten thousand years, suggesting that no obvious optimal strategy exists. However, with M3 mathematicians, we proposed to do the following:
- Change the number of containers and number of seeds to see when an optimal strategy exists. For instance, with four total containers and one seed initially in each container, the first player has an optimal strategy, against which the other player cannot win.
- Explore and implement various rule sets and strategies numerically to build intuition.
- Use a combinatorial approach to discuss the number of possible moves and strategies.
- Consider the game as a discrete dynamical system. What type of analysis is possible using this abstraction?
The topic for Summer 2008 was Dynamical Systems and Chaos; and the Summer 2007 topic was Discrete Mathematics with applications to Biology.
For further information, go to Anthony Tongen's website.
