Welcome to Somerville Mathematics

Welcome to Somerville Mathematics, a blog devoted to exciting mathematical things happening in Somerville MA. I am the founder of The Somerville Mathematics Fund, www.Somervillemathematicsfund.org
The Math Fund was chartered to celebrate and encourage mathematics achievement in Somerville. I hope you will check out my TEDxSomerville talk on the Somerville Math Fund,
I find that there are many other interesting things happening mathematically in Somerville and I hope on this blog to have others share what they are doing. So please contact me at mathfund@gmail.com if you would like to contribute an article.
Erica

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Scrapheap Showdown, Marble Mazes meet Rube Goldberg!

Erica Dakin Voolich


On Sunday, October 25, twelve teams of Somerville Students gathered in “The Cage” at Cousens Gym at Tufts to participate in this year’s annual Scrapheap Showdown sponsored by The Somerville Mathematics Fund. This year’s problem involved building a marble maze to get from one corner of a banquet table to the opposite corner of a 2nd table two feet away.


Instead of just building a ramp from table corner to table corner, students had loop-the loops, spirals, cup elevators, triggers... all sorts of interesting Rube-Goldber-like obstacles.


As a member of the Somerville Mathematics Fund board, I was involved in the designing, testing and adjusting of the problem. We got to actually build our own solution, as we do each year, to know that it is possible and to figure out the scoring system. When the kids started working on the problem, their solutions were totally different, unique, creative and exciting.


Take a minute to look at the pictures of each of the teams hard at work on their projects and read all about the A-Mazing event in the Somerville Journal. Prior to the event, the Tufts online newsletter wrote about the upcoming event.


This year’s teams were:

Rubber Duckies

• Paulo Filipe Dourado

• Nelson Moreira

• Matthew Bedell


AMS Alliance

• Matthew Correia

• Sergio Resendes

• Adam Hughes


Freaks in Control

• Sabrina Ozit

• Lola Yu


The Coopers

• Michael Shamshak

• David Cooper

• Kayla Landry


You have to Spend Money to Make Money

• Nat Dempkowski

• Yongkang Yu

• Nathan Long


The Bird is the Word

• Danny Huang

• Nicholas Cruz

•Michael Conte


Bp(as)^2

• Bipul Pyakuryal

• Aakash Sharma

• Avtar Singh


The Devastators

• Mohammad Sheikh

• Timur Addul Talil

• Anandpreet Singh


De Villens

• Deepika Bhargo

• Aaron Nevin

• Tara Costiner


P.M. Norm

• Norman Li

• Pristine Mei

• Michele Mei


The Stern Halloran Man

•Christopher Halloran

• Jacky Man

• Jesse Stern


Asian Avengers V2

• David Huang

• Raymond Li

• Joshua Ren



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