Department Hosts Math Quest
The Math Quest program provided a three-day math experience for 24 underrepresented minority girls in the 4th-6th grades from the Detroit Public Schools. When Professor Trachette Jackson received the Real McCoy award from DAPCEP (Detroit Area Pre-College Engineering Program), they encouraged her to participate in an outreach activity, in particular a math program for girls. The program was also partially funded by the Michigan Math and Science Scholars, and the girls also worked with worked with high school math mentors from the Michigan Young People's Project. Professor Jackson's Math Quest program was a modified version of the popular Math Quest game. The course goals were to introduce, reinforce, and solidify problem-solving skills as well as oral communication skills; to provide strategies for thinking through mathematical problems using a structured problem-solving process in order to generate new and original solutions; and to provide tools and techniques for solving simple and complex mathematical problems quickly and easily. Besides studying math, the girls visited the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum, the UM Planetarium in the Natural History Museum, and the UM Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.