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

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Jammin' in the Junkyard -- the 7th annual Scrapheap Showdown

The 7th annual Scrapheap Showdown was a BIG success.  You can read about it here.

The students rose to the challenge.  They didn't know until they arrived that they were going to build musical instruments.  They did a wonderful job.  Their instruments needed to play a diatonic scale and a simple tune in the key of C from a given list of melodies.  They earned more points buy building different kinds of instruments (string, percussion, wind) and by automation the playing of the melody.

Mother Nature cooperated and didn't dump large amounts of snow in Somerville and Medford -- Thank  you!
Tufts University was a wonderful host -- Thank you!
The design team who spent months designing and testing the challenge, and then collected and hauled the junk to Tufts were fabulous -- Thank you!
Our sponsors and donors who made the event and prizes possible were great -- Thank you!

If you'd like to see the pictures from  each of the teams, check out the links below:
Sticks of Doom