I think outreach is an important responsibility of mathematicians. To date, my outreach has focused on youth. I have participated in tutoring and a number of workshops for middle/high school age students. Some common goals in this kind of outreach, that I think are really important include: to show youth that math doesn't end with algebra and calculus, that math comes in many flavors and to provide role-models of real people that are passionate about math.
Career Explorations 2015
In Summer 2015, I organized a program for exploring careers and the geometry/topology of surfaces. The following is a plan (shared with math grad student volunteers) and powerpoint for 75 minute workshop for middle-school students. Learning objectives for participants were not written, but the basic hope was that students:
• Could name careers using math outside of cashier, math teacher, and mathematician. Even if they don't have the names, know a few of the skill sets.
• Engage in a math exploration that has no equations. Work with others.
When planning the presentation on careers, I tried hard not to reinforce gender stereotypes. For example, our mathematician pictured is both young and female. I chose to talk about hair simulation instead of fire or water simulation. The lead researcher was a woman, and it was for a movie that was especially popular amoung girls. In the future these materials should be made more explicitly racially diverse- perhaps choose former students, friends etc who went into these fields to be representatives?
This plan for the project had some helpful parts, including questions we wanted to ask the students, but it was buried in a wall of text. Next time, I will create a more organized and formal plan.
The math part of the workshop was successful. Students enthusiastically explored, made predictions, and were surprised by the resuts. They particularly engaged with applications such as the airplane question, the use of mobius bands in converyor belts for even wear, etc. The careers part was only partially successful: students didn't seem to relate to advantages and disadvantages such as flexibility, high pay, eventual security or long training time, high stress work environment.