Offered as a one or two night program, we aim to provide concrete experiences with math outdoors and provide the students with memorable, foundational experiences that build their confidence and understanding of math concepts and help you meet your math standards.

Math camp takes place at mount hermon’s ponderosa lodge. Teachers place 7 or 8 students in a cabin with a chaperone. During recreation time the students can choose activities such as swimming, game room, and the sport court. Meals take place in the dining hall. The student will have four or five two-hour classes depending on your length of stay. We make trail groups with your cabins that will go through each morning and afternoon class together.

Class takes the students to the building blocks of math in nature. The students learn to recognize patterns from simple to complex, determine the rule that governs that pattern and apply it. They will discover the Fibonacci pattern in nature and transform the pattern into a paper spiral through measurement. Finally student will use the foundation of patterns to use and apply measurement, proportions, averages, and ratios to concrete activities.

Class is designed to build confidence and involves the students playing a basketball game called “bump” where the student’s brains are calculating the equation of angle, force and distance without even thinking much about the math. As a team the student will problem solve another distance and angle problem intuitively and together shout “I can do math!”

Class focuses on approaching problems and inventing/brainstorming ways to exploit the nature of patterns to solve a problem like finding the height of a Ponderosa Pine Tree. We will then use an integrative teambuilding tool called the “whale watch” to explore balance and the equal sign. Explore the balance of a system and how a changing variable affects others around it. Each person added to the platform is a new variable. What you do to one side must be done to the other to maintain equality. Lastly, using projectiles we will adjust a variable of increasing or decreasing angle and see how changes affect the results. They will represent their data on a graph and write an algebraic expression.

The students will take home with them teamwork and math confidence, foundational experiences with math in context, problem solving, and application and use of basic math skills. Students will come away from E=MC² having learned how to analyze patterns and relationships, Geometric angles, measurement in customary units, addition, multiplication, division, mental math, averages, ratio, proportions, variables, expressions, equations (basic algebra readiness), problem solving and logical thinking.