My 10-year-old daughter is kind of a math whiz. She and her best friend (also a smarty pants) have sleepovers and do algebra. I’m not kidding.
Anyway, the girls are looking at what summer camps to attend in a few months and in addition to the usual swim, hike, canoe type camp, they are also looking at one math camp. The notion that anyone would want to spend their free time doing math is bizarre to me, but of course, as someone who strives to be a good parent, I suppose I should encourage this behavior. I’m sure there are lots of math camps and would appreciate hearing anyone’s experience.
In the bigger picture, what do math kids do for fun as they get older? She plays chess, but is not really that into science. The school does Math Olympia and she participates in that. Are there math clubs? She’s a cute kid and pretty outgoing, so I’m kind of nervous that as she gets older, she’ll want to avoid being associated with the nerdy, dorky kids (as a former nerdy dork, I sense she’s going to be one of those “popular” girls I was always so envious of). How do I keep her engaged?
Anything science oriented would be a great option too. The daughter of a close friend of ours has attended Space Camp in Alabama each of the last 4 years. She’s a Junior in High School right now and her career goal is to be the first female administrator for NASA. She just might make it…
It was really cool. They hold competitions and stuff, so we got to travel for it. Some schools also have mathcounts. http://mathcounts.org/Page.aspx?pid=195. Encourage her to join these types of things at school. I found that I loved doing math at school, but when I got home I just wanted to be a normal kid.
My suggestion is to encourage her to spend time learning how to manipulate computers. My 8yo son is a mathlete as well so I’ve been getting him into software programming.
On another note, she is on the right track. Mathematician was recently considered to be the best job to have. In fact nearly all of the top 20 are math related in one way or another. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123119236117055127.html
It’s interesting about the science angle. I would have assumed that because she liked math, she automatically would like science. So far, however, that’s not the case (although, to be fair, she’s in 5th grade and I don’t think science is too interesting yet). The issue probably is that science deals in hypothesis and what she really enjoys is manipulating numbers and solving concrete problems. When she gets to a course – probably chemistry – that marries the two, she may become more engaged.
My whiz kid nephew LOVES to do Sudoku puzzles. We have timed speed puzzle solving contests together. He’s catching up with me fast but I still kick his butt from time to time. He’s twice my size now so wrestling is no fun anymore (for me that is).
Amy, from what you have written she might really enjoy a variant of the Alice software environment. From the top level description at Alice.org: “Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.”
In particular, there is a version called Storytelling Alice that is designed to appeal to middle-school age children, especially girls:
"In contrast to the large number of people who use computers and computer programs in their daily lives, relatively few learn to create their own computer programs. Storytelling Alice is a programming environment designed to motivate a broad spectrum of middle school students (particularly girls) to learn to program computers through creating short 3D animated movies.
To enable and encourage users to create animated stories, Storytelling Alice includes: High-level animations that enable users to program social interactions between characters. A story-based tutorial that introduces users to programming through building a story. A gallery of 3D characters and scenery with custom animations designed to spark story ideas."see http://www.alice.org/kelleher/storytelling/index.html for more info.
If she likes chess, chesshere.com is a good website to play games on. I usually have about 10 correspondence games going on at the same time. The nice thing is there is a ranking system, so you can find players of similar ability. She’ll probably get her butt kicked early on, but once she settles into a ranking, she’ll find some competetive games.
I regret not having done math league and especially science fair when I was a kid. I was already heavily involved in band and sports, and my mom specifically told me I couldn’t do anything that would require pulling her away from the TV to pick me up or drop me off from the school 2 miles from our house.
Look for logic puzzle magazines at the book store. My wife gets them all the time and is a complete wiz at them. Its almost sickening.
Don’t know if you have a Nintendo Wii, but you can buy a game online called World of Goo. Its a puzzle game where you have to build towers out of little rubber like sticks. Laws of physics pretty much applies and they can get complicated.
Also, I recommend the band. She’s just about the right age to start. Lots of mathemtically minded kids pick up music pretty easily.
Sounds like a career as an actuary might also be in her future. You might want to see if there are any actuaries in your area and see if they have an association you could contact to find out if they have any outreach or kid-oriented program suggestions.
These two are preliminary programming environments. They are both based on Squeak Smalltalk, a language argued to teach solid programming practices: http://www.squeakland.org/
I am a female actuary and would be happy to tell her about what I do.
However, she is at such a young age, she may change her mind so many times about what she likes and what she wants to do. I won some math competitions through school and liked to do math problems on my own during the summer when I was in grade school, then my interests changed to art for awhile, then french, then physics, then back to math when I got to college. I also enjoyed dancing, gymnastics, and running in there. I did not enjoy playing music, but many mathematicians also play musical instruments, she might enjoy this.
If she is good at math and likes it, she is likely very analytical and likes solving puzzles and problems and learning new things and so she would enjoy anything that involves this. Just because she is good with math doesn’t mean she will be good at programming and computer stuff. For me, it had to be something that could keep my interest and a lot of that couldn’t and can’t.
Thanks again everyone for all the great suggestions. She’s been playing chess at chesshere.com – she started winning a few games yesterday and was furious when instead of resigning, some guy just quit out of the game (apparently, that game won’t count as a win for her ranking). I keep a pretty good eye on her, though, especially since one of the first screen names I saw was “assmanxxx” – I told her she couldn’t play any games with that guy:) No chatting or messaging – just chess.
Also, I’m not looking to guide her to a career at this point – just encourage her interest. She starts middle school next year and I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll be fighting the boy distraction and, even worse, the “it’s not cool to be smart” problem.
FWIW, I ‘decided’ when I was 6 that I would do maths. I changed my mind a few times in the middle, and now am in computational sciences, but I do mostly math stuff. I’ve always enjoyed, without the need to have anyone push me to join a group or whatever.
I’d say, let her be, maybe show her some of the cool stuff you can do with maths (women tend to be a lot more attracted to motivated science rather pure science for the sake of it)…I’d be happy to give you pointers on the cool motivated maths stuff you could show her (ranging from understanding data, be it financial, biological, environmental, or whatever science you can think of, to writing secret messages only she and her friends can read, i.e. cryptography, etc.)
Keep in mind this advice is from someone who isn’t a parent (but has given a lot of thought to what he will do when this happens)
