At Laney College math festival, kids get building blocks to a STEM career

Children shrieked and ran from puzzle to puzzle, their parents in tow, faces covered in blue cotton candy. Expecting worksheets or practice tests, they were excited to engage in the colorful math activities displayed across seven tables in the Laney College student center Friday evening

Among the favorites was a game of colorful plastic shapes that children snapped together to make three-dimensional figures. One child made a hexagonal box with a top that opened and closed so he could put things inside it. 

“What I feel is the core of education are memories that people carry around with them,” Daniel Kline, executive director of the Julia Robinson Math Festival, said. “For me it’s not the quadratic formula, and it’s not even really the puzzles or games that we teach, but it’s the feelings, the emotions that you experience through the education process and the belief in yourself to be able to solve problems, and the cool strategies that you create for yourself.”

The festival attracted over 120 people from all over the Bay Area, from toddlers, to college students, to teachers to senior citizens. The organization travels to cities and schools around the world, teaching math comprehension and critical thinking skills that are collaborative, play-based and hands-on. The festival partnered with Laney’s Math, Engineering, and Science Achievement Program, which provides tutoring and workshops to help underserved students succeed in STEM. 

The need is great in the Oakland Unified School District, where about 70% of students are considered low-income. Schools in lower income neighborhoods are less likely to have enough resources, such as books, materials and laboratories, to support student engagement in STEM. 

Channa Bannis, who attended the event with her husband and 7-year-old son, said free events like the Julia Robinson festival can help make up for some of the things that OUSD schools lack.

“Access to education is hard. Access to quality education is even harder. And so there’s a big gap, and it’s all about what can you afford,” Bannis said. “But if you have an event like this that really opens up a child’s mind to what the possibilities are, then you just start to bridge some of that gap and allow them to become the seeker of knowledge as well.”

Katharine Jolda, a science teacher at Love Elementary School in Alameda, wants to incorporate some of the hands-on learning activities in her classroom. Worksheets, she said, aren’t as satisfying as puzzles and other building activities that help students see connections and possibilities. 

“They’re not just seeing the math that’s at their grade level, they’re seeing what it could be connected to or what it could lead to,” she said.

As the night wound down, Revelle Wood, 10, and her father were still sitting at one of the tables, determined to beat the Bridges Blocks challenge. The game engaged students’ critical thinking skills with increasingly difficult puzzles: Students had to create a bridge, using three-dimensional blocks, over blank spaces while staying in designated spaces. Revelle said the festival gave her an opportunity to practice math in ways her school did not, and she spoke to the importance of youth becoming interested in STEM.

“If you get grownups interested in it, grownups usually already know what they want to do with their life.” she said. “But kids, sometimes you show them something really cool and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’”

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