School Math Club
These are some of the sessions I took for class 9 students at my school as a part of their math club. My objective was to introduce them to slightly advanced mathematical concepts through interactive sessions, to show them a fun side of math beyond what they work with usually.
Mathematical Games
In this class, I taught them how to think of games "mathematically", in terms of winning strategies and methods to analyse games. I started off with a fun example, where the students played a tournament competition based on the problem in Example 1.1
After the completion, we discussed how we can analyse the game and make it so that we always win, and then went on to discuss how we can come up with such strategies in general.
RIS Math Club - session 1.pdfWhy divisibility tricks work
I started off by giving everyone an exercise, where they simply had to find whether certain numbers were divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Most of them found this quite easy and direct - but they were stumped when I asked them the question "why".
We then discussed how we can derive these tricks by expressing the number in terms of the place values of the digits. We also had a brief introduction into "number circles", aka modulo congruency, and how we can use it to solve problems that look impossible at first glance.
RIS Math Club - session 2.pdfPermutations and Combinations
In this lecture, I introduced the concepts of permutations and combinations, but not via the usual method of defining n! and explaining the fomula. Students arranged themselves in lines to understand the concept and try and figure out the number of permutations. We also worked with combinations, by thinking of various objects that could be taken to a party, and then trying to find smart methods to count the number of ways.
RIS Math Club - session 3.pdf