The Games People Play: Learning Mathematics by Playing Games

Course Description

A week of games and tournaments in math! Come test your problem solving and pattern recognition with fun puzzles. Students will work in teams and individually to solve classic brain teasers and open real-world problems.

Discrete mathematics has important applications across a wide variety of fields. For example, solving puzzles, designing experiments, and software testing. It will allow students to better understand how to create puzzles, like Sudoku, Kenken, and Kakoru. It will also encourage abstract thinking. We will compare several types of discrete structures and emphasize that adding and removing restrictions can really change a question.

Topics for this course will include:
-Set Notation: Sets, subsets, union, intersection, Venn Diagrams
-Counting: addition principle, pigeonhole principle, 3 friends and 3 strangers, multiplication principle, binomial numbers, four types of counting, binomial theorem, and Sieve Principle
-The Games SET, EVEN QUADS, BINGO, and Sudoku
-Latin Squares
-Transversal Designs (TD): creating tournament brackets, Sudoku
-Graphs: constructions, modeling equivalencies
-Combinatorial Game Theory (Nim, CRAM, DOMMINERING)
-Relating the above topics.
-Knots (Time permitting)

We will go over definitions and examples. We will have some more difficult questions that will be proposed during the sessions. The following session we will take up solutions to these problems. There will be lots of group activities to emphasis the different ways to enumerate (count) problems.

Your workshop leader Amanda Chafee specializes in discrete mathematics. She enjoys sharing her love and expertise of math with everyone.