March is here, and with it comes the newest initiative from talkSTEM and MathFinder – the March Mathness Challenge!
We’ve compiled our walkSTEM tours of Dallas (and added a few new ones!) into a competition to explore and engage with Math in our great city. By engaging with the Math that’s embedded in our built, living, artistic, and architectural environments, you gain insights and perspectives about our parks, artworks, animals, plants, and neighborhoods. That’s right you get to see these places, objects, and animals using not only your math lens but also your STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) lens! It’s easy, flexible, free, and fun; you can take the challenge on your own or as a team. All info is on the Challenge web page. So head over to downtown Dallas, or to the Zoo, or to the Arboretum, or Red Bird Mall or any one of the 15 participating Dallas sites now!
Participants can download the Otocast app from Google Play or the iOS App Store and log in with an email to start collecting badges for visiting and learning in parks, zoos, nature centers, and more! For every seven stops visited, you’ll earn an entry into our weekly raffles, each with a prize of $50. We also have a second set of raffles for those sharing selfies and STEM questions of their own that they think of while visiting these stops, and both sets of raffle prizes double during the final week of March!
Collect all the raffle badges and advance the ranks from just starting to dribble up to toward champion-league material! The app will keep track of your progress for you, and can do so across multiple devices – so feel free to share a login with your friends, classmates, or family and make a team worthy of the March Mathness title!
For more rules, information, and endorsements, hop on over to gomathfinder.org/the-march-mathness-challenge, or watch the video below for more detailed instruction on using the March Mathness guide in Otocast.
Happy exploring!
Note that you must sign in to Otocast in order for us to be able to keep track of your raffle entries and stop visits, and to let you know when you’ve won! Also, Otocast will notify you of nearby stops and play the audio of tour stops you’re currently at automatically by default – if you find this distracting, just turn it off in the app’s settings page, or turn off the app’s notifications all-together in your phone’s settings!
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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