Math Explorations began with the students getting to know their peers and teachers by sharing their name, the school they attend, and a sport they like to play or watch. Afterwards, Ian asked the students to brainstorm lists of nouns to put on the board and then they worked to find patterns hidden within the random list. In this activity, the students had to develop a rule that could be applied to the patterns. In the next activity, Alexandra taught the group how to solve for the rule of the venn diagram instead of creating a rule. The students used the Interactivate Venn Diagrams to practice sorting shapes by an unknown rule.
After a short break, the group played two different games to find patterns inside words and commands. They had to discover what they could bring through the "Green Glass Doors" and what they could not bring through them based on the words and letters they tried previously. Next, Ian took them through number patterns using the Interactivate Number Cruncher application and even introduced them to the Fibonacci sequence! This famous sequence is a list of numbers where the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers, starting with 1 and 1. At the end of the workshop, the students were put to the test and learned how to play SET, a card game based completely on pattern recognition. The group was split up into teams and they worked together to try and find as many sets as possible while competing against other groups in the class.