To 12-year-old Sherese Grant of Aurora, there’s nothing worse than being bored by spending summer days “just hanging around the house.”
That’s why on Tuesday Sherese was happily spending the day in a math class at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a state-run residential school in Aurora.
This was no ordinary math class, but a session in logic, in which students worked to figure out the strategy of board games and analyzed how players could best position themselves to score points.
Sherese and more than 50 other 8th and 9th graders have paid $150 each in tuition and given up a week of their summer vacation to attend the school’s first Math Explorers Institute.
The weeklong institute, which began Monday, offers classes in topics such as logic and game strategy; geometry and patterns; cryptography, or the cracking of military codes; and even the relationships between numbers and music and art.
What makes this program unusual is that about 20 academy students designed the lessons and the problems, and they are teaching the classes.
The idea is that when kids teach other kids special learning and sharing take place, organizers said. The purpose of the institute is to get kids excited about math and to show them real-world math problems that are fun to solve.
Students of all abilities can attend, although the program is not designed for those needing remedial work. While it is not designed for math wizards, either, an interest in math and a certain amount of ability is important, organizers said.
“I like math,” Sherese said. “And I wanted to get involved so I wouldn’t be sitting around the house all summer. I’m learning how to analyze and interpret things that I didn’t know how to do.”
That’s the kind of interest that excites math teacher Chuck Hamberg, who has taught at the boarding school for advanced students since it opened in 1985.
One goal of the program, he said, is to expose students to “real mathematics as opposed to the typical lessons” most people get in school.
“This is a place for talented kids to use their minds and let them go,” he said.
Near the logic classroom, another group of curious minds was using computers to create fractals, or geometric shapes that repeat in patterns such as snowflakes.
In short order, the class had created complex lacy snowflakes, pyramids with doors that opened and shut, three-dimensional triangles that floated in space.
“Most people have never heard of fractals, and I think they are neat,” said Jennifer Stynoski, 15, an academy student who was helping conduct the seminar.
“I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, and I wanted to try this,” said Jennifer, whose home is in Round Lake Beach.
In yet another room, students were preparing to assign numbers to musical notes and then create new compositions based on numeric patterns.
Student “teacher” Wen Chen, 17, of Palatine also wanted to know “if it’s possible to translate music back into numbers. It’s one of the musical questions we’re going to ask.”
The Math Explorers Institute is an outgrowth of the 3-year-old Science Explorers Institute, a weeklong seminar in which visiting 4th, 5th and 6th graders work with older academy students.
The Science Explorers Institute has become so popular that attendance has gone from 50 students to 144 in the three years since it was founded.
Math and Science Explorers are two of the programs being offered through the academy’s Kids Institute.
At the Kids Institute, academy students teach other students in special summer workshops intended for children in Grades 4 through 12. It offers programs in various aspects of math and science that have been designed by students for other students, school officials said.
The beauty of the Kids Institute, officials said, is that as students design their lesson plans, they are learning and exploring math and science in new ways. At the same time, the students that they are teaching also are probing new horizons.
Academy faculty members emphasize, however, that the students-turned-teachers are not entirely on their own. They are guided by adults.
“We gave the students a variety of experiences to spark what they might come up with for their classes,” said Tonda Hager, a math teacher.
“They worked on it and came up with the ideas, and then we met with them” to review the plans.
School officials hope the programs can be a model for other schools to adopt as they work to recharge their own science and math curricula.
“In the end, I would like to think that some of the things we pilot here can be used to train other teachers,” Hamberg said.
“We want kids to engage each other and talk to each other,” he said. “It’s a nice model for the real world.”
