Take a handful of elementary school students, add a few caring volunteers and staffers, and factor in an Olympic-size swimming pool. The result is Try-Math-Lon, an event Saturday at Union College incorporating mental exercise with physical activity.
The daylong event, now in its second year, is a key element of Operation SMART (Science, Math And Relevant Technology), a community-based effort to help girls in grades 4 to 6 learn mathematics. The program stems from the collaboration of Girls Inc., Union College and the GE Women's Network.
A timed one-mile bike ride along a rain-soaked trail marked the initial leg of the Try-Math-Lon, which got under way at 9:30 a.m. Afterward, the girls were given their results and instructed to convert the minutes into seconds. Volunteers and staffers with Girls Inc. helped with the arithmetic.
The second feat was based on a sprint: Girls ran across a field to retrieve cards marked with num bers and symbols, then worked to see how many equations could be solved in a given time.
In phase three, which began after lunch, the girls traded their bikes for bathing suits and plunged into the college pool. Their tasks ranged from measuring the length and width of the pool to determine its volume, to swimming laps for an exercise on calculating mean, median and mode. Participants splashed and giggled, signaling their approval. “I like math,” said Shanieyah Flowers, an 11-year-old from Schenectady. But, she said, “I like this way better because you get to go into the pool.”
Her friend from Niskayuna, Jocelyn Girigorie, 11, was equally enthusiastic. “Math is my favorite subject,” said Girigorie, who attends Iroquois Middle School. Their comments drew a smile from volunteer Elroy Tatem, a Union College junior who supervised from the bleachers. Tatem, an engineering major from the Bronx, said it was good to show the kids that there's math and science in everything they do.
Moreover, he said, this sort of activity gives the girls a positive image of higher education, making them college-bound early on.