Robin French '15, Lainey McQuain '15, Nicole Soltz '17 and Sarah Zierhoffer '15 presented their summer undergraduate research projects at Elon's Summer Undergraduate Research Experience poster session on July 25, 2014.
Mentored by Associate Pprofessor Alan Russell, McQuain’s poster, “Origami and Teaching Language and Composition,” focused on the use of origami as a pedagogical tool to increase students’ language and composition skills.
In mid-August, McQuain will present her research in Tokyo, Japan, at the 6th International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics, and Education.
Zierhoffer was mentored by Senior Lecturer Jan Mays. Her project, “A Case Study of Project-Based Learning in a Secondary Mathematics Classroom,” studied the pedagogical technique known as Project-Based Learning, focusing on its effective implementation and its impact on student learning.
French and Soltz were mentored by Assistant Professor Chad Awtrey.
French’s research, “A new algorithm for determining when a quintic is solvable by radicals,” outlines a new method that determines the symmetry properties of the roots of degree 5 polynomials.
Soltz’s work, “Counting roots and Galois groups” aims to employ effective root-counting techniques to help identify important properties of polynomials whose coefficients are p-adic numbers.
In early August, French and Soltz will present their research at the national conference MathFest, in Portland, Oregon.