What’s Happening at OMC this Fall?

What’s been happening?

Summer Internship

This summer we ran our first ever OMC official internship, through which students created and planned educational content, innovative activities and competitions and explored their own mathematical curiosity. With OMC’s aim being to build an inclusive student community of mathematicians, we did our best to make this internship as accessible as possible by providing train passes and gift cards to our students. Madhav, an OMC intern and a junior from Dr. Phillips High School, said “Working with OMC not only gave me the opportunity to satisfy my passion for math, it also helped me grow as a person by providing me resources to work on my leadership skills and confidence.” A massive thank you to all the students who participated in the internship this summer, your dedication and creativity has bought lots of new and exciting activities to OMC.

New OMC clubs

Two new OMC high school maths service clubs have started at a public high school, Dr. Phillips High School and a private school, Lake Highland Preparatory School. On the 26^th of September students at Lake Highland Preparatory School were given the day off to participate in Heart of a Highlander Day, where they spent the day volunteering with their chosen charity. This year OMC was listed as one of the service opportunities, which was a brilliant opportunity for OMC to gain exposure and show students how they can get involved with OMC. Thank you, both Lake Highland Preparatory School and Dr. Phillips High School for your continued support! The new OMC clubs will serve as a brilliant platform to aid us in developing our private and public-school model for implementation into schools next year.

Kangaroo Awards

In June, OMC gave out the Math Kangaroo awards. We held a math collaborations with the Girls’ Angle math circle in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Ken Fan, founder of Girls’ Angle, created the questions specifically for OMC students. Together, OMC 4-8^th grade students solved 36 questions, after which they had to figure out relationships between the tiles of each of the questions. That relationship revealed a final secret question that had to be answered to get a code to open a virtual door on our computer. Registration for the March 21st 2019 Math Kangaroo is open, click here to register and create an account on the Math Kangaroo website

What’s happening this fall?

Following a busy summer with the first ever official OMC internships, Kangaroo Awards and new OMC clubs, there are lots of exciting events coming up this fall.

Fall Classes

After using Winter Park Libraries venue for OMC classes last year, we have now formed a partnership with the Winter Park Library to facilitate elementary age classes. We are now officially on the WPL calendar. Thank you, Winter Park Library for your continued support and promoting our classes! Following the confirmation of these classes, interest has been generated from other libraries and we hope to continue to expand these classes in the coming year. Online classes will continue with Ruth biweekly for advanced 4^th– 6^th graders whilst online classes with Elina – A maths and physics student in Moscow and first place gold medal winner at last year’s European Girls’ Math Olympiad – will run on select Fridays at 3.30pm and 4.30pm for AMC 10 and AMC 8. Click here to find out about the classes.

Girls Math Competition

Like the Math Scavenger hunt, the Girls Math Competition is a product of our summer internship. OMC interns worked on creating our first ever annual OMC Girls Math Competition, which aims to encourage mathematical curiosity amongst 3^rd and 4^th grade girls outside of their mathematics curriculum. There is currently a practice test online and the competition will be running on October 25^th, 5-8pm. Thank you to the generous and continued support of the Rosen JCC, which sponsors the beautiful space for OMC large events and competitions. You can register for the competition here.

Who Wants to Be a Mathematician?

Congratulations to all students who qualified for round two of the national Who Wants to Be a Mathematician competition. More than 5200 students in U.S., U.K, and Canada took the 2019 Who Wants to Be a Mathematician Championship Round One qualifying test – a 30% increase from last year’s record number of participants. Five OMC students will be moving on to round two, which will be held at Winter Park Library, on October 18^th. Thank you, Winter Park Library, for providing rooms for our students to take the qualifying tests! After round two is complete, American Mathematics Association will select 10 finalists from different regions of the US, one from Canada and one from the U.K. to compete in the championship round – which will take place at the 2019 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore on January 19^th, with a top prize of $5,000. Good luck to all those who made it to round two!

American Math Competition – AMC 8

The American Math Competition, is a national examination sponsored by the Mathematics Association of America, the examination is in middle school mathematics and is designed to promote the development of problem-solving skills and encourage a positive attitude towards analytical thinking. Students in grades lower than 7^th grade are encouraged to check the past tests to practice before sitting the exam. The AMC 8 will be running on November 13^th at 6pm at the Rosen JCC.

Exploding Dots Video Challenge & Global Math Week

For the second year in a row OMC is holding the Exploding Dots Video Challenge to help promote Global Math Week 2018 participation in Central Florida. Global Math Week aims to change perceptions around mathematics and invoke positive attitudes to exploring mathematics in creative and fun ways. This summer, OMC, together with Global Math Project, MAA and the generous help and participation of the Orlando Magic, created a public service video to help shed negative attitudes about learning new skills, whether its mathematics or basketball. This year we are doing this through the Exploding Dots Video Challenge, where you can submit a 30-90 second video telling your Exploding Dots story. The deadline for submission is October 15^th and there are lots of exciting prizes up for grabs.

In addition to all the exciting classes and competitions running this fall, OMC and students will be presenting on the 6^th of October at the Florida Association for Gifted, testing out activities that they worked on with Maria Droujkova of Natural Math this summer with the possibility of it being published by Natural Math!

The summer internship brought lots to OMC, the scavenger hunt, Girls Math’s Competition, class activities and much more. We hope to see more great things from the internship next year!

How will you be getting involved with OMC this fall?

Don’t forget to check out our next post where you’ll get to read all about how OMC are getting involved in tech this year!