Forty 14 and 15 year olds from less privileged areas of Greater London will have the opportunity of experiencing life as Cambridge University maths students next week.
Forty 14 and 15 year olds from less privileged areas of Greater London will have the opportunity of experiencing life as Cambridge University maths students next week.
The schoolchildren are the last cohort of an innovative three-year programme, funded by a $1.2m donation from the Goldman Sachs Foundation .
The Fast Forward Maths programme involves three residential workshops at Cambridge per cohort and a follow-up year of e-mentoring in maths.
The students are mainly from schools with below average GCSE or A Level results, have no family tradition of going into higher education and are mostly from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The residential course runs from 25th to 29th July and will take place at the University's Centre for Mathematical Sciences.
The aim of the programme is to encourage students with a strong aptitude for maths to deepen their understanding, increase their interest in the subject, and encourage them to consider continuing with it to A Level and university.
Maths has traditionally suffered from being seen by school students as a dull and difficult subject, and the Fast Forward programme, together with the Teacher Inspiration series for teachers, aims to overturn this image and demonstrate that maths can be both challenging, engaging and rewarding.
The focus of the July sessions is on Justification and Proof, and sessions will build on their previous visits to Cambridge, when students were encouraged to become more sophisticated problem-solvers.
There will be a screening of Fermat's Last Theorem and students will have a full social programme of events laid on for them.
In addition, students experience staying in student lodgings at Churchill College and are given information on the Cambridge admissions process.
Project Director Charlie Gilderdale said: "The aim of the residential is to widen and deepen students' experience of mathematics. They may possibly only have experienced the neat and tidy standard textbook approach before.
“We want to inspire them and give them the confidence to pose their own mathematical questions, make conjectures and develop rigorous arguments and proofs.
“This third residential course is the culmination of a year’s work encouraging the students to work like mathematicians."
The Fast Forward Maths programme began in August 2008 and preliminary evaluations conducted at the end of July 2009 showed that not only have students' attitudes to maths significantly improved, but that they are more keen to continue maths after GCSE and go to university.
The interim report, by Dr Wai Yi Feng, shows that they became much more creative in the way they approached problem solving.
Almost half said they wanted to study mathematics more after their GCSEs because their understanding had improved and they could see more clearly how mathematics - and higher education - opened up opportunities for them in the future.
One student said: "The maths you see in lectures is so different, so exciting. It makes you want to start straight away."
A full evaluation will be available in 2012.
Fast Forward Maths is run by two award-winning divisions of the University of Cambridge: the NRICH Project, which is part of the Millennium Mathematics Project, and the Group to Encourage Ethnic Minority Applications (GEEMA), which is part of the Widening Participation Team in the Cambridge Admissions Office.
The NRICH website is part of the Millennium Mathematics Project and has been providing free on-line maths education resources for over a decade. The aim of the MMP is to develop mathematical skills and understanding by providing top-quality enrichment activities for maths students and their teachers, both nationally and internationally.
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