Ness and I arrived at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Convention in Anaheim today. All we've done so far is a little booth set-up for the convention exhibition arena. The exhibit will be open for the next three days. We find looking at other displays that we're woefully short on 'flash', but that nearly all the other booths are woefully short on math. I suspect that in this sort of arena, flash will draw more attention than math will.

This will be an interesting experiment for us, and we're pretty much approaching it as just that. I think we need a good catch phrase to draw in the teachers. Maybe something like 'Materials for the Students Who Think They Know Everything.'

I'm not sure what kind of audience we will find tomorrow - much of the standard educational community is very averse not only to competition but to any sort of specialization for able, eager students. This attitude, I think, is almost perversely counter-productive, but I'm not sure how to fight it. At least in the matter of specialization for the top students, I can easily argue self-interest. It's the top students now who will be making the greatest contributions to quality of life in 20-40 years. If more people understood that, I think our education system might be a little more supportive of programs for the most avid students. But I'll have to wait until tomorrow to gauge how well that argument will go over.

While our booth is short on pizzazz, I think we have some selection bias working for us. We will have a projector up with the animations that appear on our site - DPatrick put together a nice little program that rotates through them. I imagine that teachers who really love math will be drawn at least to that. Ness put together some nice display stuff, but we didn't go budget-busting batty producing glitzy material, partially because we have no idea what to produce. Having walked through the exhibit hall a few times, I know what I don't want to produce - flashy garbage with no math content. If we do this again next year, though, we will have to be somewhat flashier. We'll also need to have better hand-out doodads, and probably an interactive game to play for prizes. Something like the games I played at CA State MATHCOUNTS.

Those are my thoughts for now. I'm not really sure what to expect. There are some other math contest-world names at the convention - AMC, ARML, MATHCOUNTS. Our booth is right around the corner from the Davidson people, so we'll learn more about their program. Most importantly, we'll learn if this is really worth doing next year when we have a larger line of textbooks to offer.

But my main instinct in walking around the convention center is, 'I hate selling.' Sigh.