Click here to listen to this week’s JAM: Of Zombies & Semaphores
Yesterday afternoon a group of students and families converged on the Oak Room for a Family Math Fair. Children moved between centers with a mix of math challenge activities. The afternoon involved learners of all ages – at one point, for example, there were adults, two kinder kids, a 4th grader, and a 6th grader working together on the so-called Zombie problem. How do you get a group of people across a bridge in 17 minutes in order to get away from the Zombies. There are several key limits that make it tricky – only two people can be on the bridge at a time and they always must be holding the single lantern. Still not clear? Check out this link for more information.
The afternoon highlighted an important part of our program – providing a just right range of math experiences to challenge children and – as increasingly is becoming clear – their families. Indeed, I was talking with a 2nd grade family recently who shared how much the math challenge problems have become a lively and engaging family conversation each week at dinner.
Last Friday at Flag, Challenge Coach Kelly Scholten highlighted the results of this year’s Math Kangaroo competition for 3rd and 4th graders. Twenty one 3rd and 4th graders participated, with one student – Kushal – ranking #3 in the state and nation and two other students ranking in the top 30 in the nation (out of 36,000 participants around the world!). We are so proud of all of our students who participated, knowing that these opportunities help students see themselves as mathematicians and problem solvers and that they help children know they can do hard things (and those hard things can be fun!).
All of this practice has our students potentially positioned to take on a really big and very public challenge. Adobe has started transmitting a new message through its semaphore – the four glowing wheels at the top of the tower. For those who are not familiar with what a semaphore is – that would include me before I read about this the other morning in the San Jose Mercury News – it is a gadget used to convey signals, usually with arms or lights. The Adobe semaphore wheels can assume four positions -vertical, horizontal, left-leaning diagonal, and right-leaning diagonal. The four wheels have 256 possible combinations, with the wheels turning to a new position every 7.2 seconds.
Adobe has had two previous messages that were transmitted – the complete text of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 back in 2006 and Neil Armstrong’s iconic quote “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” back in 2017, and both took multiple years to solve. This new semaphore started transmitting on May 11, 2023 (just six days ago). With our Upper School students settling into our new downtown campus, maybe some of them and their teachers will rise to this ultimate challenge. It would certainly be a worthy problem of the week…. Or perhaps year(s).