While some computer scientists may sit in front of a computer screen all day, in the summer you’re more likely to find Professor Diane Souvaine, Chair of the School of Engineering's Computer Science Department, at the Discrete Math Workshop, helping middle school teachers make math fun.
Founded in 2006 by Souvaine, who also serves as a Tisch College adjunct faculty member, the Discrete Math Workshop (DMW) is a high-quality, standards-based professional development program in mathematics. The program is geared towards training Massachusetts math teachers in grades five through nine.
“We are committed to working closely with the school districts around the Tufts campus to ensure that we provide a high impact program for teachers in the field,” she said. “By training teachers we are indirectly influencing hundreds of children who will have enhanced computational thinking skills to draw upon.”
Designed specifically for teachers in the Boston Public School system and surrounding areas, the Institute helps enhance teachers’ mathematical knowledge, instructional strategies, and attitudes towards math. Each year, two cohorts of approximately 25 teachers attend the DMW which runs for 8 days for first time participants and 4 days for returning participants.
Participants leave the DMW with new frameworks for thinking about math education and lesson plans ready to be integrated into their classrooms. Staffed by professors and graduate students from the Computer Science, Math, and Education departments as well as past participants, the workshops help teachers bring new, exciting problems and hands-on activities back to their students.
Souvaine said that one of her favorite aspects of the program is watching teachers working together collaboratively to discover mathematic concepts and then demonstrating their passion for their discoveries as they deliver their own capstone workshop presentations.
“The most powerful experience for our teaching staff is knowing that when teachers leave our Institute, they will have an immediate impact on children,” Souvaine said. “We hope that at a young age children will enjoy and appreciate discrete mathematics, which forms the foundation of computer science and computational thinking.”
Before coming to Tufts in 1998, Souvaine participated in the nationally-recognized Leadership Program in Discrete Mathematics (LPDM) at Rutgers University. During the summer of 2002, she collaborated with former colleagues at Rutgers to start an LDPM site here at Tufts which worked with teachers of kindergarten through eighth grade. In 2006, Souvaine, her Tufts colleagues, and representatives of the Boston Public Schools designed a new curriculum focused on the Massachusetts standards and on teachers in grades five through nine.
“The change in the institute’s title from LPDM to DMW reflects our new curriculum and our new focus on middle school,” Souvaine explained.
In addition to running DMW, Souvaine also designs algorithms and data structures as part of her research projects in computational geometry. According to Souvaine, a data structure is a repository of information. She’s trying to organize the data so that it needs less storage and so that information can be retrieved quickly.
“Geometric data structures have become pervasive and an integral part of life and can be queried to produce driving directions or the name of the nearest Italian restaurant,” she explained. “Since the space and query time of a data structure depend upon the type of queries it has to support, it is important to study which tools and techniques are suitable for which data structures.”
