Voice of Hope has teamed up with Mathfinder (our NSF-funded initiative in partnership with SMU and others) and talkSTEM to create a math walk on its beautiful campus in West Dallas, together with a new series of short video guides that are now a part of our open-access video library!
Join students and parents as they explore the Voice of Hope facilities and ask questions about what they find – how are playgrounds built? How are industrial kitchens run? And how can we use the math and estimation skills we already have to figure out these engineering and management challenges? The math walk at Voice of Hope campus is special also because several of the stops were co-designed in partnership with the children in the Voice of Hope community! Back in October, 2022, we had the pleasure of spending an evening with children. They focused on the first two, very important aspects of math walk stop design: NOTICE and QUESTION. At each stop location, the children spent a little time noticing the space in question. After this, they spend some time brainstorming as many questions as possible, grounded in what they noticed. Finally, they selected those questions that they felt they were most interested in and that was connected to math broadly – and those were the key questions for the stops in the Kitchen and in the Playground! Make sure you watch these short 3 minute videos to hear the specific questions they came up with.
We hope that lots of families and staff at Voice of Hope will enjoy the math walk they can easily take on the campus – both in person as well as virtually! Also, we are sure that the five stops on the walk will lead to lots of other ideas and questions about the campus which members of this wonderful community will express using the language of math. We can’t wait to hear the questions they ask. Stimulating children and their adults to notice and question the environments they move through is exactly the goal of all MathFinder’s Math Walks!
walkSTEM@Voice of Hope content can be viewed on the talkSTEM YouTube channel, the MathFinder video library, or on the free Otocast app, where you can also view maps and locations of the tour stops.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant DRL 2115393. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This tour is designed for upper elementary, middle and high school students.
Dr. Koshi Dhingra has dedicated her career to STEM education and is passionate about having every child live up to their potential. Seeing a lack of girls and other underrepresented youth in STEM programs, she founded talkSTEM in 2015 to address the imbalance. She has a doctorate in science education from Teachers College, Columbia University, has years of experience teaching in graduate and undergraduate programs, and has held leadership roles in universities. She advises and collaborates with a broad range of educational institutions globally. Dr. Dhingra began her career teaching science in middle and high school in New York. She lives in Dallas, Texas with her husband, three children, and two dogs.
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