Kanish Creary was the first student to set sail on the Phantom Ship. Dressed in a plastic rain poncho and life vest, Kanish confidently sailed toward the misty skyline of Manhattan on an Optimist pram, a 7-foot wooden boat adorned with a bright white sail.
It was a feat for Kanish, not only because it was her first time sailing, but because the boat she was riding in was built with her own hands.
Kanish is 11 and in sixth grade. She worked with a group of students from her school, J.H.S. 292, in Brooklyn, New York, to construct the boat. She likes to “give things a shot” so, with her Tuesday afternoons free, she signed up for an after-school program called Brooklyn Boatworks.
Throughout the school year, she and her classmates transformed four sheets of plywood into a sailboat, using saws, hammers, clamps and drills.
Kanish’s mother, Christine Creary, said at first she doubted her daughter could build a boat. Today, Creary’s proud to see her setting sail. “I’ve never seen her doing anything like this before,” Creary said. “So this is a new adventure.”
Huddled underneath a canopy to protect her from the rain, her mother smiled, waved and snapped photos of Kanish floating out into the harbor. Eight other boats bobbed in the water as students from Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn sailed into the harbor at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Kanish is one of 127 students to participate in this year’s Brooklyn Boatworks program. Brooklyn Boatworks is a nonprofit that brings a boat-building program to students in schools across New York City. This year, Brooklyn Boatworks worked with students from nine different schools, though they hope to scale the program in coming years.
Through the boat-building process, students gain hands-on STEM expertise and social skills. The program incorporates tool safety, map reading, environmental education, construction and project management. During the course of the school year, the students also go on field trips to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, South Street Seaport, New York Harbor School and the Brooklyn Bridge Park Education Center, where they learn about New York’s maritime history and local sea life.
“Our goal is not that everybody becomes the captain of a ship, the goal is that students feel successful to achieve big dreams to go after what they want,” Marjorie Schulman, Brooklyn Boatworks’ executive director told NationSwell.
The schools choose who participates, and it’s “usually it’s a mix of students who are achieving [and] who are not achieving,” said Schulman. Some schools hold writing contests for students who want to participate, while others hand select students to participate in the program.
“Not everybody thrives in a traditional school environment, so our model works for students who are traditionally successful in the school as well as those who aren’t,” Schulman said.
Groups of no more than 12 students build a boat over the course of the school year. This year, 11 boats were built by students in the program.
“It’s really a feat for them to be on the water and to be in the boat that they built and have the trust that it’s going to float,” Schulman said.
Their 30 weeks of hard work culminate in one day in June. The schools come together at Brooklyn Bridge Park for a graduation ceremony and to set sail in their completed boats.
A group of girls huddled around each other, giggling and chatting by the water on Pier 2. They said they named their boat Pizza Sail because pizza is their favorite food. “And because the sail looks like a slice of pizza,” they exclaimed.
The STEM skills students gain from the program are important, but equally important are the social skills, said Schulman. The girls are best friends now, but at the beginning of the school year, they hadn’t all known each other. “Now we always say hi when we pass each other in the hallway,” said Aspia, one of the middle schoolers. Students learn how to be a leader and also how to follow one, Schulman said.
Pat Nason, an instructor, agreed. He said the goal of the program isn’t just to build a boat, but to create a safe space for students. A space where it’s OK to fail or take a break or be frustrated. As long as the students learn from those moments. Throughout the year, he watched as attitudes and confidence levels changed.
“There was a certain point where we realized we were near completion, and I could see their confidence levels get much higher,” he said.
The students’ confidence showed as Phantom Ship successfully floated along with the eight other boats with eccentric names: Savage Geniuses, Sea Okurrr, Get Wrecked. Students signed up one at a time to take a ride in their self-constructed boats. Each student was paired with a sailing instructor who helped navigate the winds.
Tisman Coleman said it was great to see his daughter out sailing. For most schools, the program functions as a two-hour after-school program. Coleman said every Tuesday, his daughter was sure to remind him that she’d be coming home late because of Boatworks.
“My child, the most she ever built was Legos,” he said. Now Coleman has a helping hand for tasks around the house. His daughter can now use a handsaw, hammer, drill and screwdriver like it’s second nature. “She’s already my little kitchen helper,” he said. “Now I can start making her help me with other stuff.”
Mike Sangirardi, a dean at I.S. 125 in Queens, New York, heard about the program from some of the participating schools.
Outside of the skills the students learn, they’re also gaining a better understanding of their urban environment. Many students don’t realize they’re living on an island, Sangirardi said. Some can’t swim and others have never seen the waterfront. The program gives them a chance to connect with their surroundings.
Sangirardi said as a dean he sometimes works with “students who are causing trouble.” By interacting with some of the same students at Brooklyn Boatworks, he gets to see those students shine. His favorite part is at the end of each session when the students gather around and reflect on how they’re feeling.
“They did something productive,” he said. “That’s better than being on their cellphones.”
The sense of achievement extends past the program and into their everyday lives.
“There’s this level of accomplishment that they can feel,” Schulman said. “And maybe it’s the first time that they’ve really felt success in the school year.”
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Tag: stem education
Meet the Mastermind Behind an Innovative, New Way to Teach Math
In elementary school, Matthew Peterson struggled mightily with math. When an instructor explained a problem, Peterson would be so focused on figuring out the language that he forgot the beginning of the question. In a traditional classroom setting, “If you couldn’t follow the instructions from the teacher, you were lost. You had no way to learn on your own,” Peterson, who suffered from dyslexia, says. It wasn’t until Peterson’s dad started drawing pictures to help his son visualize math equations that he had the breakthrough that turned him onto how exciting, creative and fun the subject can be.
Seeing his challenges in school as an opportunity to be solved, the boy who once hated math went on to study engineering, biology and neuroscience in college. From there, Peterson began to think as an entrepreneur — creating, innovating, problem solving and ultimately, transforming the way mathematics is taught in American schools. “To me, it’s not acceptable that so many students exit the school system afraid of math,” he explains. Starting with a summer research program in 1994, Peterson spent a decade working to prove that math could be taught without language, which can create a barrier to understanding the concept. This is true not only for kids who struggle with language like he did, but for any student since talking about math using words layers two completely different ways of thinking on top of each other.
That mission ultimately became the Irvine, Calif.-based MIND Research Institute and its ST Math program, a series of games starring Jiji, an animated penguin that introduces math visually. Students must figure out how to help Jiji get past a variety of obstacles (each representing an important mathematical concept) by building bridges, filling in holes, and so on. “It is very difficult to create software that will translate into improved test scores,” Peterson, MIND’s co-founder, says. “People have been trying to do that for many years, and there is very little to show for it. But there is a very consistent result that games, especially visual games, can build spatial-temporal reasoning. What our approach does is build spatial-temporal reasoning, and then connect that spatial-temporal reasoning to mathematical understanding,” accomplishing what other software companies haven’t. In fact, schools that fully implement ST Math see up to three times growth in math proficiency.
Alex Belous, education portfolio manager for the Cisco Foundation (which has supported MIND Research Institute since 2004), says that when he initially reviewed their program, its installation and training strategy was predominantly in-person, which wouldn’t scale. “It was an ideal partnership, as we were able to assist with their conversion to a web-based and more scalable delivery method, adding courses and grade levels, as well as creating a teacher-dashboard that allows them to see where students are most challenged and give them relevant help to keep learning,” Belous says. “We’re proud to be part of something that is providing large impact and pleased that ST Math is likely to scale much further in the next five years.”
The United States lags behind other nations in math and science performance, ranking 29th in math and 22nd in science, according to the Program for International Student Assessment. By harnessing the power of the digital revolution, MIND Research Institute and Cisco are able to address this problem and prepare young people to succeed in science, technology, engineering and math fields that are critical to economic growth and global competitiveness.
That formula has proved to be remarkably — and consistently — successful. When MIND’s ST Math software launched, only 12,000 students used it. Today, the program reaches more than 1 million children in more than 3,000 schools across 45 states (including about 70 percent from traditionally underserved backgrounds). In the U.S., only 30 percent of kids leaving middle school are proficient in math. Impressively, students’ math proficiency has doubled or even tripled when using ST Math. “It’s not the students who are incapable of learning, it’s the environment,” Peterson says, going on to explain how the software creates a setting where students from all backgrounds can not only become skilled in math, but learn to enjoy it.
“Many people have this misconception that experiences are fun, but learning isn’t really an experience,” says Brandon Smith, MIND’s lead mathematician. A lot of learning software essentially takes the approach of designing a fun game and then trying to shoehorn some math into it, Smith explains. MIND’s games are designed from the ground up to focus on core math principles. They’re entirely visual — no words or numbers at all — and feature deliberately simple animation. “We don’t want you to be distracted by anything that is not the heart of the matter,” he says.
The result? A fun game where simply uncovering what the next puzzle is teaches kids the underlying concept. It also educates them on how to approach unfamiliar problems, how to think creatively and how to persevere and keep working on something difficult. ST Math enables students to learn at their own pace by giving immediate, personalized feedback on every answer — something that’s only possible using software, Peterson says.
Another positive outcome of ST Math is that girls often find more success with it than boys: an uncommon result among math programs. In the U.S., women are underrepresented in science and engineering fields (representing just 29 percent of the workforce compared to 46 percent of all workers), but programs like ST Math can generate the confidence and enthusiasm for girls to pursue jobs in those industries.
Technology not only makes that kind of learning possible in one classroom, it makes it scalable to thousands of them. “It’s not enough to just do a research program to prove that something is effective,” Peterson says. “If you want to change the world you have to make something that is scalable.”
“People use the term ‘innovation’ so often in Silicon Valley, but it is actually extremely rare to come across something that is truly revolutionary and actually effective and scalable,” Cisco’s Belous says. MIND’s technology demonstrates how the potential to scale and replicate is necessary for a solution to be sustainable and successful at addressing social challenges. Not only does ST Math transform math education, but also it has the potential to be applied in many other areas of education. “This completely new, non-language-based approach has the ability to capture every mouse-click of every child to see where kids are most challenged and refine the games appropriately to make them even more effective. It is fantastic for math education and student outcomes, but the fundamental innovation could potentially be applied to a far wider set of subjects.”
MIND’s games certainly have the potential to revolutionize how young children think about themselves. Studies show that most American students possess what’s known as a fixed theory of intelligence: a belief that “intelligence is something that you’re born with,” Peterson says. That mindset can hold kids back from learning math because they think if you can’t solve a problem, you’re not good at it. The kind of self-directed learning in ST Math reinforces the principle that when you stick with a problem, you get better at it.
Lisa Solomon, a principal at Madison Elementary School in Santa Ana, Calif., sees that tenacity in her students. ST Math software is used at three area schools, including Solomon’s, where nearly 100 percent of students are Hispanic and about 90 percent qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches. “It’s helping us to see what our students really can do,” Solomon says.
These days, when the growing opportunity divide reveals the sheer importance of a strong education, MIND Research Institute not only levels the playing field, it helps struggling students bound to the head of the class and achieve their greatest potential.
This was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur, and act as a social change agent.
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This State Might Offer a Novel Incentive to Help Teachers Pay Off Loans
Some problems seem almost too daunting to solve. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. And that’s the optimistic viewpoint that lawmakers in Indianapolis are taking.
In order to help alleviate two major problems in our country — the student loan bubble and the still-weak economy — they want to offer qualified students up to $9,000 in state funds to pay off their loans if they go on to become teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM subject areas), according to the Associated Press.
This proposal, currently awaiting Senate approval, would also extend to teachers in areas with educator shortages, the AP reports. Recipients would receive this money after completing their third year of teaching in Indiana.
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This law could be especially helpful not just for our trillion dollar student loan bubble but also for our economy, as the fastest-growing jobs are in STEM fields (think: physician assistants, computer software engineers, dental hygienists, and veterinarians, to name a few). According to the Department of Commerce, STEM jobs grew at a rate of 17 percent in the past 10 years, compared with a 9.8 percent growth in other occupations. President Obama has endorsed an education in STEM to help make sure our students have the skills they need for the jobs of the future. Looks like Indiana is making a promising start.
This Teacher is Helping Young Girls Literally Build Their Way to a Better Future
Emily Pilloton needed to teach fundamental social and life skills to her students, so the teacher and designer did that the only way she knew how — through an innovative, hands-on shop class.
Now, the shop class has followed her from Bertie County, N.C., to Berkeley, Calif., where she founded Camp H, an after-school camp that teaches design and building skills to girls 9 to 12 years old. Why girls? Pilloton told Slate she noticed her male students were more willing to readily tackle problems while female students usually wanted a set of directions or steps before attempting the project. “There aren’t enough spaces for girls to be together as girls doing things that feel audacious,” Pilloton told Slate. “I don’t want girls to just be given a hammer and say ‘You’re holding a hammer, that’s awesome!’ I want to teach them how to weld. And to work on projects that don’t feel artsy and craftsy. Not like straight-up wood shop, but to balance the creative and the artistic side.”
Pilloton is now teaching an after-school class that will teach girls “to fix the things that need repair, installation, and maintenance in our everyday lives,” which will include checking the air pressure in tires, fun experiments and core math and science concepts — subjects that students often become bored with during Pilloton’s target age group. In the future, the program plans to have students build furniture and lighting for women’s shelters.
“I want the projects either to have a personal connection or to teach the girls about being a citizen,” Pilloton told Slate. “I will never ever just give a girl or a student a set of plans and tell her to follow instructions.”
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