SNAP Math Fair?

      I would certainly run a SNAP-style Math Fair at my practicum school, New Westminster Secondary School, because of the diverse academic ability of the student body.  NWSS offers an array of streams catering to all types of learners: Honours, Non-Honours, Apprenticeship & Workplace, and International Baccalaureate Standard Level & Higher Level.  The non-competitive nature of the SNAP fairs I consider to be highly appropriate for adolescent learners for two main reasons: it removes the incentive to seek out parental/other adult assistance, and (more importantly) it focuses the event on the math, not the trophies.  The problem-solving nature of SNAP encourages those students at NWSS who may not possess a heavy theoretical knowledge base to solve a variant of a problem that is relevant to their own lives and is appropriate for their age/skill set.  Having the students involved in the presentation helps their confidence not just with explaining mathematics but with speaking in front of others in general (recall, the students initially only pose the problem, not the solution).  I would partition the NWSS fair into academic streams so that visitors could see how similar problems (generalization/special case) are approached by different learners (e.g A&W and IB).  Since the SNAP fairs encourage group work, it's very possible that the visitors (who come from diverse backgrounds themselves) can better learn from certain members of a group (e.g. someone who is proficient at geometric explanations) or from a specific stream (A&W vs. IB) than others.  A key benefit to drawing the problems from archives of professionally-constructed books is that (quite often) there are many different ways of extending, simplifying, and explaining the solution.