Outreach Programs

The Department's outreach efforts for this year were to a large extent a matter of carrying forward last year's plans and projects. One, however, has blossomed forth from being a work in prospect to being a work in progress, and a very exciting one at that, so we shall start there.

The project in question, which goes by the name of PD3, is the brainchild of Prof. James King in our department. I think it is collaborative in every possible sense of the word. For a start, it is funded by an NSF Math Science Partnership grant in conjunction with the Park City Math Institute, which works in conjunction with the Institute for Advanced Study. Locally, Jim set up collaboration with Prof. Ilana Horn in the College of Education and the two of them arranged for a partnership between the UW and three high schools in the Seattle school system. Throw in some graduate students working with them at all levels and you have, as I said, something approaching maximal collaboration. The project focuses on how the teachers do their mathematics teaching, with an intensive summer institute in Park City, Utah, and school-year follow-up in a huge variety of forms. At the core of the project is the effort to help all the math teachers at each school function as (yes!) a collaborative team.

Three other outreach efforts that didn't turn up in last year's newsletter are the Washington Math Case Study project, TEAM-OP (Teaching for the Environment: Active Mathematics on the Olympic Peninsula) and Project TIME (Transitions in Mathematics Education). The first is a collaboration with WSU and Eastern, working on materials for professional development at the often-neglected middle school level. The second is a collaboration with the College of Forestry, working on professional development for some of the often-neglected rural districts. And the third is working on the very challenging issue of the transition from high school to college mathematics. That one is actually based at Green River Community College, but we get to claim some credit, not merely for being collaborators, but the fact that it originated in part from connections at WaToToM (Washington Teachers of Teachers of Mathematics), which our department sponsors. A more major part of its origin is the Transition Math Project, in which we have been taking part.

I've really only scratched the surface, but space is running out, so I'll resort to a list, with the understanding that anyone who wants to know anything more about any of them should get in touch with us forthwith. For instance, there's SIMUW (Summer Institute in Mathematics at UW), which, thanks to a generous donor, lets us bring 24 very bright high school students to live on campus for six weeks and immerse themselves in learning mathematics both from a variety of mathematicians and from each other. Last spring we did our 16th annual Math Day for high school students throughout the state and now we're head heading into #17. Math Fairs in the elementary schools are going strong, supported by the Department and the GK-12 Project (another collaboration - this one with Applied Math and University Child Development School) which takes UW graduate students and UCDS teachers into some high-needs elementary schools to be a resource to teachers trying new kinds of teaching. The Northwest Math Interaction summer institute continues to attract teachers from all over the state, and our 497 courses continue to have topics and schedules such as to make them accessible to in-service teachers.

And on top of that, we are very much open to other people's ideas of ways we might reach out. Got any to suggest?

Ginger Warfield

The tradition of building a big geometrical object at the Northwest Mathematics Interaction Summer Program for math teachers continued in 2006 with polyhedra made from dowels and whiffle balls.