Adding it All Up: Wilmette Math Circle continues to grow in its second year

From cracking Darth Vader’s code to calculating Halloween candy, the Wilmette Math Circle is keeping math fresh and exciting for second- through fifth-grade students.

New Trier High School senior Sam Langdon founded the Wilmette Math Circle at the beginning of his sophomore year, inspired by his own interest in math and time as an instructor at the Mathnasium of Evanston-Skokie and for the Glencoe Math Circle.

“I kind of wanted to blend two [angles]: both helping kids improve on topics that are used in school and showing that math can be fun and practical,” said Langdon, now the lead instructor of the Wilmette Math Circle, of his goals in establishing the group.

Its at least the second student math group that runs in Wilmette. The other, Kids Inspire Kids, from another New Trier senior, Aren Emrikian, holds classes at St. John’s Lutheran Church, as profiled in The Record.

The Wilmette Math Circle’s free classes run biweekly on Saturdays and Sundays at the Wilmette Public Library. These classes are split into fall and winter/spring sessions, scheduled so as not to interfere with instructors’ AP and final exams. 

The Wilmette Math Circle runs two, 1-hour classes per day (Saturday and Sunday) — one for the second- and third-grade students and another for the fourth- and fifth-grade students. 

There are 10 instructors across all four grade levels at New Trier, two of whom are Langdon’s younger brothers (a freshman and a junior). Four to five students attend each Math Circle, with two instructors to keep the student-to-instructor ratio small.

“One thing we pride ourselves on is how much attention we can give to each individual student,” Langdon told The Record. 

A typical Wilmette Math Circle session begins with an icebreaker, designed to help each student feel comfortable in the class prior to getting into the math problems themselves.  

“Each worksheet has a cover page,” Langdon explained. “There’s a big image on it, and there’s a scenario. … A Halloween one we did is: You and your friends want to maximize the amount of candy you can get on Halloween night, but you need to watch out for ghosts who are trying to steal your candy, [with] an icebreaker at the bottom. For example, what is your Halloween costume?”

Some of the class worksheets can take up to three hours to create, but Langdon said he prioritizes creating them himself. 

“I think I can stress the fun and practical aspect in a way that some worksheets tailored towards schools can’t,” he said. “Instead of just knocking out 10 multiplication facts, each class that we do has a theme, say a ‘Star Wars’ day, and they are using prime numbers to crack Darth Vader’s code, or maybe they’re pretending to go on a vacation trip with their friends, but they need to figure out how much their flight costs or how far away the hotel is.”

Each worksheet often includes word problems related to the specific theme so as to allow for real-world applications. That means the work can often focus on logic and, Langdon said, “some of the thinking that translates back to math while maintaining a focus on its practical applications.”

The last 15 to 20 minutes of each class are dedicated to a game, often Shut the Box. Players roll dice and put down numbered tiles that add up to the number rolled. The goal is to close all the numbered tiles from one to 12. A player wins by successfully “shutting the box.” That is, by putting down all 12 tiles.

To round off their days, students can win prizes such as rubber ducks.

As for what’s next for the Wilmette Math Circle, Langdon, who is interested in studying business or economics and math in college, said he hopes to pass the torch before he goes off to college and see the group “keep thriving.”

“And it’s always very nice to see kids come back or come into the next session joking about something that we talked about the last session or even just smile,” he said. “So, it’s very nice to see everything that went in behind the scenes pay off in terms of our finished product.”

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