Service & Outreach

Service

• Organizer of the Topology seminar at the University of Michigan.
• Co-organizer, along with Diana Hubbard, of the IBL lunch at the University of Michigan. If you are interested in learning about or discussing IBL (i.e. inquiry-based learning), then please ask to be added to our email list to learn about our monthly meeting time.

Outreach

Wayne County Math Teachers' Circle: This is a professional development program for math teachers around the Detroit area. It is run as a math circle where teachers get exposed to fun and interesting math in hopes to inspire them in their own classroom. The group meets monthly and, in January 2017, I led the circle. My activity was entitled Stretching Fractions.

Wolverine Pathways: This is a great program offering students in the Ypsilanti and Southfield school districts -- districts that tend to serve a low-income population -- a pathway to the University of Michigan. If the students complete the program and get accepted to the university, then they are given a full scholarship to attend. The math department runs a weekly math circle as part of the program. I ran a session revolving around problem solving and logic; the session ran out off a collection of problems that I put together with Beth Wolf.

FEMMES: This is a program dedicated to closing gender and racial divides in STEM fields. FEMMES hosts a capstone once a semester for girls between 4th and 6th grade from diverse, underserved communities where the students partake in various STEM activities led by volunteers. In the Fall 2016 semester, Diana Hubbard and I ran a session dedicated to tic-tac-toe with a focus on "game theory" aspects. The goal was for students to try to provide an optimal strategy and realize that every game should end in a tie. We then introduced students to playing tic-tac-toe on the annulus and the torus and had them think about the same questions.