They’re Learning STEM Skills by Dancing to Destiny’s Child

At the start of the L train in the upper-class Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, there are 10 city-funded Wi-Fi hubs within two blocks. When the train hits Brooklyn, two miles east, there are another six Wi-Fi hubs being installed in the hip East Williamsburg area. But the numbers start to fall as the train dives deeper into Brooklyn, where poverty is rampant. By the time it hits the neighborhoods of East New York and Brownsville, there are none.
Out here, almost a third of homes don’t have internet access — the gateway to a community’s broader participation in STEM industries and the jobs they offer. High schools, meanwhile, are under-equipped with the basic infrastructure needed for internet access and technology education. Music, dance and the arts, in contrast, are well established in the community.
This disconnect — in the midst of a national trend to move funding from the humanities to STEM — is what led Yamilée Toussaint, a mechanical engineering graduate from MIT, to start STEM From Dance, a program for high school girls that merges the local culture of dance and music with a future in learning complex science and technology concepts.
“Students who would be a natural fit for, say, a career as a coder don’t necessarily know that until they are introduced to it,” Toussaint says. “Through dance, we’re attracting them to a different world that they wouldn’t otherwise opt-in themselves.”

At STEM From Dance, students learn to code stage and costume lighting along with visual effects for their performances.

Toussaint, a tiny woman with large hair and a soft voice, created the program five years ago. Normally it spans a full semester, but this year she increased the number of girls she can reach with a summer intensive curriculum focused on circuitry.
During the course of one week, participants practice a dance routine that they pair with lessons on building and coding circuits.
“It was hard at first,” says Chantel Harrison, a 17-year-old participant from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “I didn’t know what it was about, honestly.”
Harrison and a couple dozen other girls are taught to wire battery-powered light circuits. They sew them into their dance costumes to create splashy light effects synced to a song’s beat. For many of them, this is their first introduction to computer science and coding.
And that is a stark reality check. In New York City, where technology often seems boundless — and where there have been huge strides to build up “Silicon Alley,” New York City’s own version of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley — kids educated in the city’s outer borough’s face significant barriers to a future working in the tech industry.
“If we cannot allow our children to have first-class computer equipment in a first-class city, they’re not going to be prepared to be employed at a first-rate corporation,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams tells NationSwell. “We cannot have a digital divide in our borough and in our city.”
Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have pushed for high-speed internet access and STEM course integration into the city’s high school curriculum by 2025. But in Brooklyn, a study published in December 2016 by the Brooklyn Borough President’s office found there is progress to be made: Internet access is subpar (the average rating is 3 out of 5) in the district’s schools; there are only enough tablets and laptops for 7 and 20 percent of the borough’s student population, respectively; and 70 percent of schools don’t have an established computer science curriculum.
“The mayor has a very strong goal, but the question is, are we set up to meet this goal based on current investments in schools?” says Stefan Ringel, a spokesperson for Adams. He adds that reaching the 2025 goal will require more investments in infrastructure upgrades as well as in the curriculum.
“There is a lot of talk around getting these students active in STEM education, but I’d say for our program, if we have 12 girls sign up, maybe one has actually been exposed to coding,” says Toussaint, as she watches a group of six teenagers practice a dance routine to Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.”
“We’re not trying to make engineers or professional dancers within a week,” says Arielle Snagg, an instructor with STEM From Dance who also has a degree in neuroscience. “But we are hoping to give them an idea on how they can use technology within this art.”
Snagg, originally from Bushwick — another impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood — says she understands the plight of students who live in these parts of New York. Of those who work (and only about half the population does), just 5 percent do so within the tech and science fields. And getting more women into technology can help a labor force that is desperate for diversity, especially when it comes to women of color.
After a week in the camp, Harrison, who will be a senior at Achievement First Brooklyn High School in the fall, says she gained a new appreciation for the integration of dance and science. “And I’ve gotten better in math — I’ve even learned to love it.”
Next spring, Toussaint will see her first group of students graduate from high school. And though she hopes that many of them pursue technology in college, more than anything she wants them to enter any career with confidence.
“The point is to let [these girls] know that they can do anything, and they don’t have to do one thing,” she says. “They just have to open up their minds a bit.”

To Help Young Girls, This MIT Student Brings Together Two Unlikely Disciplines

The words “don’t” and “can’t” mean two drastically different things.
Yet, when Kirin Sinha, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tutored younger students, she noticed that boys often used one word, while girls used another in the same scenario.
Boys said that they don’t understand fractions, whereas the girls said they can’t.
That subtle discernment combined with Sinha’s love for dance led to an idea that’s rethinking the way in which we approach STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering, and math to the uninitiated) learning among females. About a year and a half ago, the theoretical math and computer science and electrical engineering major founded SHINE, an eight-week-long after-school program for middle school girls combining dance classes with a tailored math curriculum.
Sinha, who began taking tap, ballet, and jazz at age three, realized that her self-confidence and discipline came not from her love of math — but from her years of dance training.

“You’re taught to work really hard and work through the sheer sweat and grit,” Sinha, now also a professional dancer, told the Boston Globe. “That stuck with me through math.”

MORE: Poverty Doesn’t Prevent These Kids From Having Fabulous Feet
Struck by the thought that perhaps it was dancing that built certain skills that were left out of math curriculums, she launched the after-school program in hopes to encourage more young females to be confident and interested in math.
The Boston and Cambridge-area program begins with dance class followed by time spent solving math problems. Sinha also designed the program to convey math through games — using movement and dancing to work out a problem that typically is reasoned in silence in the classroom.
“And when they go upstairs and they have a mental block about — ‘I don’t understand how to solve this equation,’ we can say, ‘Well, think about what you did at the dance studio downstairs,'” Sinha told CBS.
For example, the girls solve algebra problems by assigning dance moves to different parts of an equation or play a game of Simon Says to formulate a geometric shape.
The program, which is slated to expand to a selection of New York public schools next year, has not only encouraged more young females to be comfortable doing math but also to feel confident. Sinha has tested some of her students at the beginning and the end of the program to measure gains and has found up to a 273 percent improvement, CBS reports.
This summer Sinha is working toward expanding the program nationally and plans to attend the University of Cambridge in the fall on a Marshall scholarship, where she hopes to launch an international version.
While she’s aiming to attract more female STEM students, Sinha’s hope is to teach young women that they shouldn’t feel boxed in by a stereotype.

“What we really want to teach these girls is that those boxes that they feel they might be in are completely imaginary,” she added.

Poverty Doesn’t Prevent These Kids From Having Fabulous Feet

While harried middle-class parents might worry about finding the time to chauffeur their kids to all their different after-school activities, low-income families have a different problem: They can’t afford these activities at all.
Dance lover Catherine Oppenheimer didn’t want to let money stand between kids and the chance to dance (which, with costumes, costumes, classes, contest entry fees, and shoes, is one of the most expensive pastimes).
Oppenheimer began her career as a professional dancer with the New York City Ballet. Her mentor there, Jacques d’Amboise, not only led the company in performing, but he also established the National Dance Institute in New York to give inner-city kids a chance to dance. When Oppenheimer retired from performing, d’Ambroise encouraged her to bring such a program to another group of needy kids in New Mexico.
So two decades ago, Oppenheimer went and founded the National Dance Institute of New Mexico (NDI). Last year, the program taught dance to 8,000 kids in 80 public schools in the southwest state, according to the PBS NewsHour. It costs $5 million to run the organization, but fundraising covers the bulk of that so the majority classes are free, including in-school instruction for fourth and fifth graders and after school classes for preschoolers and older dancers.
The program culminates in a big show that gives the kids a chance to shine, such as one that recently featured 500 dancers in the Santa Fe school district, as well as some of their parents and a group of local firefighters.
In a 2013 study that measured the health and well-being of American students, New Mexico ranked last among all states. But an independent study found that kids participating in NDI raised their grades in science and math and improved their physical fitness.
Sixteen-year-old Emery Chacon, who has been dancing with NDI since fourth grade, believes dance has made a difference in his life. “Yes, my grades before, they were moderate, from C’s to — like C’s and D’s, but now, actually, with NDI, it’s actually improved to B’s and A’s in most of my classes,” he told Kathleen McCleery of the PBS NewsHour.
Through the years, NDI New Mexico has produced a few professional dancers. But more importantly, it’s created many more dedicated students who continue to perform the right steps toward a promising future.
MORE: Music Can Change A Troubled Kids’ Life. Here’s The Proof.
[ph]