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This week's goal is to become one with squares.  Mathletes should challenge themselves to learn the first10 squares; maybe the first 15 squares; if really ambitious, the first 20 squares. Knowledge of the first 24 squares makes every math students stronger in all disciplines, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, quadratics, and cubics. See the attached pdf.

Some Mathletes created one cube and some dozens, some small and some huge (one was 64 times the volume of the standard size).

The children created buildings with their cubes with dimensions no more than 4x4x4 and then learned how architects use Front, Top, and Side views to communicate their creations to the builders.  The attached power point will take you through these exercises.  Also, starting on page 11 of the powerpoint, we gave them three view drawings and they had to create the buildings as if they were the builder reading architectural drawings.

Many years ago, there lived a selfish raja in India. He ruled that all

the people should give him almost all of their rice for safekeeping,

so that in a time of need there would be rice to eat. One year, a

Welcome to the seventh year of Mathletes 2010-2011!

The children created cubes (or regular hexahedron) from square pieces of paper. First we explored the wonderful properties of a cube:

In ancient Greece around 250BC, Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician devised a simple way of finding primes under 10 million.  He would simply eliminate all of the numbers that were not prime, starting with 1.  Then he would cirlce the first prime (2) and then cross out all of the even numbers or multiples of the prime he circled. Then he would circle the next prime (3) and cross out all of its multiples (of course, half of the multiples of 3 would already be crossed out since they were also multiples of 2).  He would then move to 5,  and so on.