Woolslair Elementary School Outreach Event

On November 3rd, we had our second outreach event at the Woolslair Elementary School and had the opportunity to introduce “Operations Research” through math-related games to 5th grade students! Anthony was in charge of the “Dice Rolling Game” in which each student rolled two dice many times and created a tally of how often each number came up. He discussed the findings and explained briefly how probabilities work on the chalkboard. Tom put tape on the ground to create a graph with a starting and an ending node; and students tried to walk from start to finish to get the shortest possible path. Vrishabh was in charge of the “Matching Game” in which the students tried to match all friends and pets by considering the different needs of each friend and each pet. Finally, Mik explained “Combinatorics” through a map coloring game in which students tried to color the maps according to the rule that states (or countries) touching each other cannot have the same color. Overall, it was really great to reach out to 5th grade students and introduce Operations Research. We look forward to reaching out to many more!