Events/Announcements
November 18 12:00 noon 1:00 p.m. Science Brown Bag - Dr. Eric Pyle
December 3 - 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
Motivating Students in STEM Disciplines
Dr. Ken Barron and Dr. Chris Hulleman
December 4 - 8-9:30 a.m.
Motivating Students in STEM Disciplines
Dr. Ken Barron and Dr. Chris Hulleman
December 4 - (BRCC) - 8:30 - 10 am (JMU) - 2:30 - 4 pm
Motivating Students in STEM Disciplines
Dr. Ken Barron and Dr. Chris Hulleman
March 9, 2010 (snow date, March 10, 2010) The 51st annual Shenandoah Valley Regional Science Fair is scheduled at James Madison University
March 18-19, 2010 The 17th Virginia Junior Science and Humantities Symposium is scheduled at James Madison University.
News
Center Co-Directors Bob Kolvoord and Eric Pyle were part of a panel on science education on the 30 March edition of WMRA's Virginia Insight radio program. Download a recording of the show.
Bridging the Valley: A STEP Ahead for STEM Majors
James Madison University has partnered with Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC), Bridgewater College (BC), Eastern Mennonite University (EMU), SRI Inc., and the Shenandoah Valley Partnership to address the challenges of building additional STEM major enrollments and retaining students to program completion. The National Science Foundation awarded the partners nearly $1.5 million to meet this goal.
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.
