As she sends them bouncing out across the floor, the brain activity in the room shoots off the scale.
Kids count, laugh, point, and hold their heads.
It's a game of recognizing patterns that they've been playing off and on for the past three days, and you can tell by the looks on their faces that it's driving most of these kids a little crazy. But nobody is giving up. Even the ones who don't have a clue to solving this mathematical mystery are bound and determined to figure out how many petals are around the rose. Games like this are the tools that help teachers Fitchpatrick and Kathy Lyon lead 25 third, fourth, and fifth graders through a three-day immersion experience at ORNL's Adventures in Math and Science Camps. At the same time, from a simple game like Petals Around the Rose they're learning observation skills, how to pick out patterns, how to form and test hypotheses.