Hi all,

I have heard about the Epsilon Math Camp for younger kids and was wondering if anyone has had any experience with it? If so, would you share your thoughts?

DS will be 10 and is strong in math and science. I am looking at various options, but he isn't ready to be away from home for 3 weeks on his own yet. The Davidson program would have been a nice fit, since it is short, but our schools do not let out until late June.

Any other options we should consider. I am looking at some of the SIG/CTY day camps as well. My only concern is that in our experience, the GT program at the local college really was not very challenging. He enjoyed it somewhat, but felt like he had already covered much of the material, and I fear the CTY programs would be similar (although one option would be to encourage him to take a class that isn't in math/science). All thoughts appreciated.

Cat

I'm not familiar with the Epsilon camp. We've had some challenges with our ds and summer camps -we don't have any gifted-specific camps for kids here until they reach middle-high school, and we're far away from any of the Davidson/CTY/etc camp locations (with a ds who has no desire to do an away-overnight-etc experience). What's worked best for our ds is to find him camps that are outside the traditional school academic subjects, so that he's exposed to new, creative, different ideas. Not necessarily intellectually challenging, but the newness of the material spurs his creative brain to new ideas which keeps him happy and occupied

He's also been doing a bit of online college-course video viewing after school this fall and enjoying that too.

polarbear

DS8 attended Epsilon Camp last summer and we plan to have him attend again this summer as a 9 year old. He absolutely loved it. The math was almost all new to him (Euclidean geometry and proofs) which he thought was great! The camp is 2 weeks and parents have to stay overnight with the kids...it is not a sleep-away camp. DS's comment was that he learned more in a day than he learned all year in school.

He also attended SIG last year and the year before (day camp) and he liked it, but it was not challenging the way epsilon was.

Kate

Epsilon was a fabulous experience for kids who really love math. It would not be a good fit for a child who is not REALLY passionate about math. It would also not be a good fit for a child who is not ready to sit through 5+ hours of math a day in a lecture hall. Kids really need to have the emotional maturity/self control to be able to sit through five college-style classes a day. The instructors are university professors; they are not elementary/secondary teachers, and they do not have the classroom management skills of a schoolteacher. Kids who aren't able to self regulate in that environment are probably not great candidates for it.

It was a very intense camp, and I think most of the kids who went had an incredible experience. I do think it's important to recognize that there is not a lot of free time. The schedule last year was lectures 9-12, lunch 12:30-1, free time (or supervised lawn time) 1-3, lectures 3-5, dinner 5:30-6, and professor "office hours" and homework help (there were about 5 homework assignments) 6:15-7. Many evenings there was a 7:00 math activity (e.g. movie or origami). The amount and intensity of the activities was really invigorating for most of the kids, but it was also very tiring!

With all of those caveats, though, for kids who really love math, it's an incomparable experience for that age group. We've never found anything else that's even close to it.

Can some one tell me about the accommodations, location, and whether any younger siblings were present? I am considering it seriously, but it would be our family vacation as well. Add that to the cost and I would want to be sure it is a good fit for my son and our family.

DS9 (will be 10 by camp) is in 4th in public school. He goes up to 7th grade honors level math (in our district it is pre-algebra and beginning algebra). He is still getting an A+, but is now seeing new material, so is generally happy (and has a fantastic teacher). He doesn't have a problem meeting Epsilon's eligibility requirements. He has no problem paying attention (as long as he is interested) and has no behavior problems - gets along fine with the older kids as well as kids his age.

On the other hand, while he does loves math (devours Life of Fred and Murderous Maths books and does Alcumus for fun), he doesn't live and breath it either -- he has a lot of other interests as well - including some deep interests in science (and Minecraft ). He likes learning new things, but also likes his down time. Also, since he is in school all day, I try to encourage him to do non-academic things when he is out of school - sports, games, art, etc. to the extent he wishes.

Hmmm...

The web page http://www.epsiloncamp.org is currently giving me a This Account Has Been Suspended message, and apart from your (I assume) question, there'd been no activity on the FB page since March. I have to wonder whether this camp still exists...?

[ETA it's up again the next day. Looks good, although there's very little mathematical info and I'd have liked enough to assure myself that they'll be taught by people who know their stuff! I was tempted to wonder whether we should apply next year, until I noticed that they require a full IQ test report. (Both cost and not wanting such a label-number puts me off doing that; DS should surely qualify but I'd resent having to ask the q...although I understand their PoV. Hmm.)]

It worked for me last night, but you're right, it's not working now.

I think most of the kids at camp have a lot of other interests, too. But, like Nan said above, it is all day of sitting in a college lecture hall. The breaks are pretty short: the kids would play a little soccer, throw paper airplanes around, play chess, or read during them. They eat lunch and dinner together. After dinner there are "office hours" where there is more math. Electronic games/computers (ie: minecraft) are prohibited even in the dorm during free time (what little free time there is.)

We went expecting to make it a family vacation, too, but didn't have time for anything other than camp. This year, the in between weekend will be open, so we plan to go to Rocky Mountain Natl Park for the weekend...we had tried driving there for a day trip last summer and it was too much from Colo Spgs.

We do not have a second child, but the people who did utilized the day care so that a parent could attend the parent classes.

If you have other questions, let me know! Kate

The camp is taught by college professors who definitely know their stuff. They are EXTREMELY enthusiastic about teaching the young kids. Every time I thanked one of them for doing the camp, they replied that it was their honor or privilege to be able to interact with the young math minds. The down side of having college professors teach is that they are used to college kids sitting still in a lecture hall. They had a bit of a problem, especially the first few days, of keeping the kids in line. There was some chanting, some boys-against-girls chatter, some call-outs, etc that I don't think the professors knew what to do about. As parents, we recommended more aides in the classroom to deal with those, so hopefully the camp will provide those this summer. So even if a child is normally well-behaved, s/he might join in with the silliness that someone else started, making the class a bit chaotic!

It's good to hear that that was your experience. Before laying out thousands of dollars on going to such a thing, though, I'd want names, personally. Not all college professors are equal, and not all are reliable guides to the subject*; sometimes, organisers of events for children put enthusiasm so far above expertise that accuracy suffers.

*I am one, that's how I know ;-)

Good point! I have no way to judge their quality as math professors since I'm only a veterinarian...I know nothing about math. The director, Kathleen Zehender is very open to questions, though, and very quick to reply!

Kate, that's a lot of math. How much other camp stuff is there? What are the kids doing during the breaks? Any canoeing/sports/physical activity?

What's in the parent seminars, and do they last all the hours of camp? If we went, we'd have to bring some work with us. I'm still trying to figure out how we'd make it work.

DeeDee

I started a thread regarding Epsilon Math Camp at the Well Trained Mind forum a few months ago http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=274889 . One poster there, Kathy in Richmond, is one of the organizers. I suggest that people with additional questions join that forum. She would likely answer them.

The kids played soccer or frisbee during the breaks between classes. Some parents took their kids hiking to the nearby Garden of the Gods during the lunch break. One day we went rafting as a group. Some kids played Dominion or other board/card games during the evening. For my son, after dinner he needed time away from everyone. We weren't able to participate in the office hours, but we did attend a couple of movie nights.

The parent seminars talked about gifted kids in general and also specifically how to find outside resources for your math kid. A lot of info came from parents themselves about how they found mentors, which online math programs they had used, which tests/competitions were available, and other summer math opportunities. The formal-ish parent class was in the morning and the afternoon was set aside for informal discussion.

I attended almost every parent meeting, because I felt like I had to get every single bit of help I could. That is not true for everyone. Most parents really knew what they were doing with their math kids. I felt alone in my floundering!! Several people worked during camp hours.

As for accommodations, there is a dorm on campus with single beds and a full kitchen. You can be on the campus meal plan and never use the kitchen. Some people stayed in a motel instead of the dorm. If you are on campus, everything is within walking distance. People set up carpools for lunch hiking trips or grocery shopping.

Yes, Kathy is the Kathleen Zehender I mentioned above and she is very quick to respond via email. I had lots of questions for her before camp last year and she was very helpful.

DeeDee, it is a lot of math. There were approximately 10-minute breaks between each of the lecture hall sessions (so two breaks in the 9-12 session, and 1 in the 3-5 session). For kids who weren't picked up for the 1-3 break, it was a chance for kids to run around on the lawn, play soccer, or hang out with friends. It was most definitely not a typical summer camp experience with a little math thrown in; it was a highly structured, intensive math camp, with math that most adults would not be able to do. Most of the kids who were there seemed to really thrive on it, but it would not be a good fit for a kid who was not into math or who was borderline on meeting the admissions requirements.

A lot of people made it into a family vacation, but those who were happiest about that were probably those who had planned extra time on one or both ends of camp. There's really no time for family sightseeing during the camp itself, though it sounds like the middle weekend will be free this year, which might be a nice break from the intensity!

Thanks for the info-- helpful in planning an overall balanced summer.

What kinds of topics did they do, and at what level of depth? DS is working on level 9 ALEKS right now ("high school geometry") but at the moment he prefers algebra. By July, of course, that might have flip-flopped again.

DeeDee

DeeDee, I sent you a private message.

Thanks, Nan!

I am the professor who taught the epsilon geometry course in 2011. I taught from the beautiful Green Lion edition of the famous T.L. Heath translation of Euclid's Elements. This is the book I used when I taught upper level undergraduates and graduate students at UGA in Athens, GA. This is considerably above the level of the geometry course I myself had in high school and also what is normally available now, say from Harold Jacobs' book Geometry. These kids were stronger than a typical college class and I just loved teaching them, although it did take a good part of the first week for us to get to know and respect each other. I apologize for my primitive class management skills. But I think we mostly solved this within three days.

We went from scratch, Euclid's own postulates, and a critical examination of them in the light of modern theory, mostly due to Hilbert, and guided by the beautiful book by Robin Hartshorne, written for his college class at UC Berkeley. I ended up showing how the limit theory of volumes in Euclid and Archimedes allowed the computation of the volume of a sphere, and then leads to calculus, and even wrote up but did not present, an argument for how Archimedes could have computed the volume of a 4 dimensional sphere.

I conjecture there is no way the kids could have ever seen this material before, unless they went to college. Indeed I made up some of it myself just for them. But they are so bright, it went well, better even than when I taught it in college. Since this stuff was so intense and high powered, we had an afternoon class in which we did only hands on constructions of solids from cardboard, such as icosahedra and dodecahedra, and they really enjoyed that. For this I myself learned for the first time how to really construct a pentagon. I had never learned it in high school and not really grasped it in grad school even when i taught it until last summer. If you want to explain something to 9 year olds, or anyone, you should really understand it! In preparation for the course, we emailed about some advanced algebra, including Euler's explanation of how to solve both quadratic and cubic equations, something I had not understood that well before even though i had taught it to grad students.

This year I envisioned going forward with a more general geometry course on curved geometry, showing that Euclid's geometry fits in between positively curved and negatively curved geometry, as the case of flat geometry, i.e. zero curvature. Thus we would cover spherical geometry first ( a surface of positive curvature) and then geometry of negative curvature ("saddle surfaces") and show how the curvature is reflected in the angle sum of a triangle. I.e. on a sphere, the angle sum of a triangle is more than 180 degrees, and gets larger as the area of the triangle gets larger. For negatively curved surfaces the sum is smaller than 180 degrees, and there is an upper bound to the area of a triangle. if time allowed we would explore tessellations of the various planes by polyhedra, including negatively curved ones which allow more possibilities.

Ultimately I found I did not have have time to prepare adequately for this course since I was learning the material myself, and when I admitted this and withdrew, George hired an expert who is a college professor with research experience at the highest level in this material (he has published on it in the best research journal in America, Annals of Math.), and I believe it will be very exciting for the kids. The Euclidean geometry course will also be repeated for the newcomers. And there will be other courses as well.

Pardon me if my participation was unexpected, but I hoped to be able to answer some of the questions asked here. My experience was that the camp organizers are of the highest quality and focus primarily on mutual respect and mathematical expertise of the first order. I would send my kids. The expertise of the faculty is quite high. Basically they are research mathematicians qualified to teach graduate students in the area.

The demands on the kids for sitting and listening at length seemed high, but I was amazed at their ability to do it well. When I saw kids who were busying themselves doing something else, sometimes I called on them to keep them involved (I knew all their names) but the second week I eventually just gave them their space, and spoke mostly to those who were listening. At the end I really liked those young people and they made me feel they appreciated and liked me. i will never forget that experience. We live all our lives as teachers hoping to meet students whom we can help at this level.

If you want to see what we did mathematically, you may consult the books mentioned, and also my notes from the class which are on my webpage and were made available to the students along with the course. (See http://www.math.uga.edu/~roy/, near the bottom.)

I am willing to bow out here so the discussion can proceed candidly if desired.

Thank you for writing this! I just wanted to repeat how much my son LOVED these two weeks of math. We cannot attend this year, but will attend next year since he will still be young enough.

Sounds like it could be an interesting camp for my mathy PG boy. It's in my neck of the woods this year, so we were very interested. I tried three times to get someone to return a call or email me from the camp, but never got a response. I gave up and assume the experiences must be hit or miss. I wonder if there's another camp like it that we could pursue? Anyone have additional recommends?

Here is the email I have for Kathy Zehender of epsilon camp, but I also got no response last week from it.

kathy@epsiloncamp.org


She says on her website that they have a spam filter that may drop some emails, and one should call, but you say you tried that. I just know that last year it was not quite fully subscribed, so I am slightly surprised if it is this year. Maybe the feedback like the nice comments here from last year made it more popular?? George Thomas' reputation alone was apparently enough to launch it last year "sight unseen" for most people. He is still running it, and does just a superb and inspirational job.

I know of no other camp for the same age group. You might try calling and/or emailing again if still interested. I think this offers a unique experience.

Hi, I'm Kathleen Z from Epsilon Camp.

syoblrig, I'm sorry that you had difficulty contacting the camp this year. The camp phone goes to a voice mailbox which I access online, and camp emails go directly to Dr. Thomas, the executive director of Epsilon. To the best of my knowledge, I've returned all the phone messages that I received this year.

If you (or anyone else) is interested in finding out more about Epsilon or would like to know if the camp might be a fit for your child, I invite you to email me at the address in mathwonk's post above. We'd love to hear from you!

I came by this thread while looking up other topics here on Gifted Issues. I was at Epsilon Camp 2011 toward the end of the program, as one of the presenters of parent programs, and will be there for the entire length of Epsilon Camp 2012, again working with the parent program. To me, one of the best signs that the program started well, even when it was brand new, is that about half of the families who attended last year are coming back for a second year of Epsilon Camp, and they have generally been talking it up favorably among the families they know in online networks we are mutually part of. My oldest three children are all too old for Epsilon Camp (my oldest attended MathPath, during one of the years when it met at Colorado College). I would be glad for my youngest child to attend Epsilon Camp, as a local friend of hers has.

I encourage the participants in Epsilon Camp 2012 to share been-there-done-thats here and elsewhere online so that parents can think about the trade-offs of participating or not on the basis of varied and complete information. During the camp, feel free to tell the staff exactly how you really feel about how things are going, as I expect the ongoing effort will be to improve the program continually in all aspects.

I'll see the 2012 participants by next week. Safe travels to all.

I'm wondering about this for next year (2013), and specifically am wondering whether there is some kind of demo lecture online to see whether it would hold DD's attention. I think she might enjoy it, but it can be hard to predict sometimes how she will react to things (especially an entire day of math, for two weeks) and it would be nice to see whether she was interested in a snippet. I'm going to also email the Epsilon person at the email above, but wondered if anyone here knew--or knew of anything similar. If that's not available, is it like EPGY, or Khan academy, or anything else I might be able to show her?

well it is not like khan academy, which is an excellent explanation of math ideas, but intended to remain as simple as possible, accessible to essentially anyone.

epsilon camp is oriented to to the very strongest math types. I tried to be as clear as the lectures on khan academy (within my ability), but i did not need to assume as consistently that the students did not know anything. I was face to face with these brilliant kids and thus could see how I needed to ramp it up. One day after starting, I realized just what i was dealing with in terms of ability, and shifted gears accordingly.

so i guess i am saying epsilon camp was on the level appropriate to the students in attendance, which was very very high. as i said above, epsilon camp is like upper level undergraduate school, but for children.


i would like to hear from attendees from 2012. my own information is that the camp was even more successful than the previous year, which makes me ecstatic. best wishes to all, and i still invite every camper to contact me for advice or tutorial in math as long as you/I live. do not feel bad if you have no time to do this as i know you are the cream de la cream who are in everyone's sights, and have many commitments,

best regards,

Roy

Sorry for the thread necro!

Has anyone considered Epsilon Camp for their 7-11 year old or has sent their children to the summer program recently? It has been a while since this anyone has contributed to this thread and I wanted to make sure that this Camp is still a popular one. Through the Davidson Young Scholar weekly emails, we have seen this program advertised a number of times. Seems they have two separate programs, one geared for the 7-8 year olds and one for the 9-11. DS7 will be going to a different program this summer, but will be of age for their older program in the summer of 2018.

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

What did you mean by another camp in AR? Arkansas?

From what I understand in perusing the information on the website, a parent will have to attend with the child. So the parent and child live in a dorm room for the two weeks?

How old was your DS when he attended last year? Was the camp overwhelming to him in any way? Current curriculum states that students will be working through Euclid's Elements. Is that what he experienced?

DS works with pre-algebra elements often and has been exposed to a good amount of algebra. If he's comfortable with the pre-test on this link other than the last two questions in part C, would that be a sufficient minimum for the camp?

Thanks in advance!

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience Portia! Just to clarify, DS7 would not be going to Epsilon camp this year as the admissions deadline has already long passed. This summer he will be going to one of the camps at Davidson (STARS) for a week to get him used to the experience of living away from home. He will be 8 next month, which will put him at the 9 year old minimum for the Epsilon Camp's 2018 Summer session.

Can you explain a little bit more about the parent program that runs in tandem? Are all the parents corralled into a room of their own each day?

Since many of the instructors from last summer are now starting a camp of their own in AR, do you worry about possible diminished level of instructor quality? I just looked up Camp Squared and it seems to be a one week camp with three of Epsilon Camp's previous instructors.

From what you shared about Epsilon Camp so far, my interest is definitely piqued!

Really appreciate the information. Definitely a lot to look forward to for next summer. Great to hear that parents will have plenty to do for those two weeks.

I'll check in with you late summer to see how you and your DS enjoyed year two of the older program at Epsilon!