Meeting notes from Oct 25th

Video: Adding a sequence of numbers (referred to as "Gauss's trick" on the Many Cheerful Facts handout).

Homework: Finish Warm-up 3 and Workout 1 and check your answers below.


Solutions to Warm-up 3

Solutions to Workout 1 #36 - #40

Meeting notes from October 18th

In our meeting we covered two important concepts: the Pythagorean Theorem and Combinations.

Homework: watching the following 5 videos.  Complete warmup 1, warmup 2 and workout 1 if you haven't already.  Check your answers with the solutions below. 

If you are missing any of those worksheets, see the first post for the link.

Understanding the Pythagorean Theorem

The Distance Formula between two points (This is an extension of the Pythagorean Theorem)


Combinations: This is one of the most difficult concepts we will cover this year.  The videos will help you understand it!

Counting with Combinations 1

Counting with Combinatios 2

Computing Combinations 1

Solutions to the worksheets we have done so far: (It's better for the student to attempt to solve these problems on their own first before looking over the solutions.)

Solutions to Warmup 1

Solutions to Warmup 2

Solutions to Workout 1 (first five problems)

Introduction to Mathcounts and Test Date December 6th

Mathcounts can be overwhelming for students because there are a lot of new concepts for them to understand that they have not covered yet in their regular math classes.  I will make resources available on this blog to try to help them have the tools they need. Each week we will go over new concepts in the meeting.

There will be a school competition in December (Tuesday December 6th from 3-4:00pm) to determine which students will represent our school at the chapter competition in February.  In order to be competitive, a good mathcounts student will do the following:

1.  Attend the weekly meetings. TIME CHANGE: Now Tuesdays 3:00-3:45 (not ending at 3:30)
2.  In the meetings we will go over some of the problems on a worksheet.  The students will finish the worksheet at home and check this blog for solutions.
3. View videos that I post to explain difficult and new concepts.
4.  Read the yellow "Many Cheerful Facts" handout and keep it for further reference.

RESOURCES:

Many Cheerful Facts - This is the handout I made to help students with some new concepts.


If you are missing a worksheet we went over in class, you can use the following link to find it.
Mathcounts handbook


-- Michelle Johnston