Harrelson News–2000
PAMS Summer Camps
by Richard Chandler
Each summer since 1991 the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences has sponsored a two week residential camp for high school students. Originally the brain-child of Bob Savage, it has been administered by Mike Smith of the Science House since Bob's retirement two years ago. Students choose from four areas: mathematics/statistics; physics; chemistry; or marine, earth and atmospheric sciences.
This past summer Ashley Allain (a graduatestudent in statistics) and I ran the mathematics/statistics camp. After doing this several years, one thing I've discovered is that high school students do not want to sit and listen to me lecture on the wonders of mathematics, especially when it won't be on the next exam. Ashley and I arranged a lot of field trips, showing them, as best we could at their level of comprehension, how mathematics and statistics are used out in the real world. In some cases (for example, the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant), this connection is rather tenuous, but we wanted to emphasize that mathematics and statistics are somewhere in the background of a lot that goes on around us.
In addition to Shearon Harris, we visited [TC]2 (textile research and development), the Environmental Protection Agency (statistics of pollution), the WTVD studios (weather prediction), the North Carolina Highway Patrol (accident reconstruction), and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (statistics of cancer and 3-D computer graphics).
During the times when I had sole responsibility for the students on campus, we visited the World Wide Web via the SICL lab and also saw three mathematics videos: "The Proof" (Andrew Wiles and the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem), "The Man Who Loved Numbers" (Ramanujan), and "N is a Number" (Paul Erdos). They seemed to enjoy each of these but the thing they especially remarked on was how emotional Wiles became when describing his solution to the 350 year old problem Fermat had left us!