This page contains links to sessions of our mathematical seminar for several middle school students (they were in the 7th grade in 1999, in 8th grade in 2000 etc.) From now on this seminar is called here MathCircle. The seminar ran from October 1999 thru June 2003 and encompassed 136 one-per-week sessions.
a few of the problems were not solved during sessions. Moreover, two or three of them appear to be much more difficult than it may seem at first glance.
Each session takes 1 hr 30 min and starts with a full review of homework questions - usually takes us 20 to 40 minutes. After that we plunge into some specific topic: graphs, remainders and Diophantine equations, sets and cardinality, inequalities etc. That entails both discussing theory and problem solving.
Most of the time there have been four students attending the sessions (minimum: 3, maximum: 5 - that goes mostly for the first year; now there
are three permanent members in our MathCircle).
The homework success ratio (that is, a percentage of homework questions successfully solved at home by at least one of the participants) used to be pretty high: about 90%-93%. Only one in seven questions went unsolved (that doesn't mean that their solutions were not eventually discussed at the sessions). During second half of the third year, however, it gradually dropped (rather drastically, I might add) and hangs now only about 50-60%.
times.
