Not everyone can grasp higher-order mathematics, but Tyler Moore is trying to change that. At the Wellspring Symposium on Wednesday, the math and education major brought along some nifty visual aids – puzzle cubes – to help students better understand group theory.
Over and over, as students filed through to listen to him present the results of the research he conducted over the summer, Moore enthusiastically explained how puzzles that retained their shape when rows were rotated were considered “groups,” whereas those that didn’t, such as a mirror cube, were not. Using a 2-by-2 puzzle cube, he also showed how to visually calculate possible outcomes.
The visual aids were the focus of his Reeves Summer Research project: helping students more easily grasp mathematical concepts.
“If you didn't think you could get past calculus, well, you just learned a little bit of Math 400,” he told a group of three students listening intently, “so a big pat on the back for that.”
Moore’s was one of 11 poster presentations being conducted during the first hour of Wingate’s first-ever fall Wellspring Symposium, held in the Ethel K. Smith Library. After the poster presentations were finished in the reading room, seven oral presentations were given in the A/V and Cornwell rooms. Three more oral presentations were scheduled for today.
Dr. Terese Lund, coordinator of undergraduate research, couldn’t have been happier with the student turnout and the quality of the presentations. In years past, the Wellspring Symposium was held only in the spring semester, but this year faculty members decided to combine the School of Sport Sciences’ Contemporary Issues in Sport Forum with the Wellspring, which justified the creation of a fall event.
“We have so much interest that we decided that there was another opportunity for us to provide this amazing forum for students,” says Lund, also an assistant professor of psychology.
Students presented research on a range of topics: makerspaces, gambling, sexual assault on campuses, wheelchair use in sports, even immunological memory in crickets. Six projects presented during the Symposium were funded by Reeves Summer Research grants. Other research was conducted for the Honors Program and as part of the School of Sport Sciences’ core curriculum.
Two outliers were Nicklas Johansen, who received an LED grant to study easily degradable polymers, and Daniel Rumley, who received an REU (research experience for undergraduates) placement at Purdue University, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. Over 10 weeks, Rumley, a junior chemistry major, studied how oxenium cations reacted with dimethyl sulfide. Working with two graduate students and a faculty advisor, he used a mass spectrometer to study the difficult-to-capture ions, and for an hour on Wednesday he patiently explained the outcomes to waves of Wingate students who stopped to hear his presentation.
Presenting this research should pay off in the long run for the junior from Monroe.
“This is a good experience, because obviously in the future if I go into grad school, I’m going to have to present stuff,” Rumley says.
Bri Hudnall, a senior from Winston-Salem, will also be presenting in the future – much more so than most of her peers. The elementary education major is hoping to teach fourth- or fifth-graders after she graduates in the spring, so explaining her research to Wingate students helped hone her classroom skills.
As a member of the Honors Program, Hudnall compared data on school systems that use the LETRS reading program vs. that from systems that use phonics. In her poster presentation, she revealed that LETRS had not produced better student achievement on reading tests.
“Over the coming years, maybe we’ll start seeing a difference, but as of right now there is no statistical difference,” she says.
Hudnall anticipates using tools and information she acquired from conducting the research to help her future students learn to read.
“It’s given me actual things I can implement in the classroom,” she says, “but it’s also taught me that I can’t solely rely on those things for all my learners.”
Moore, a senior from Weddington, also plans to teach one day, eventually in a college setting. To be a professor, he’ll need an advanced degree, and he says that getting the Reeves grant and presenting his findings to his fellow students will pay dividends over the next few years.
“I want to go to grad school, and I’d like to pursue higher-level math,” Moore says. “Being able to have undergraduate research experience is unheard of for a lot of undergraduate students in math. Hopefully, it will set my applications apart but also give me the experience I’ll need going into grad school.”
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