STEM Night

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Ask any major or faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science to describe their discipline. You might be surprised by their answers. The words beautiful, surprising, fun and exciting are bound to come up. Recently, they had a chance to share this enthusiasm with local public elementary students.

On Thursday, January 12, MSCS faculty and students volunteered at the first annual STEM night for elementary students at Capitol Hill, a Saint Paul public school.  MSCS seniors Cecylia Boccovich, Elise DelMas and Brenna O’Neal and Chemistry senior Kevin Sullivan joined MSCS faculty members Andrew Beveridge and Susan Fox (and her 13-year old daughter Christine!) at the event. They led fun, hands-on activities that introduced the children to interesting and powerful ideas and techniques from mathematics and computer science. In addition to Macalester, other participants included the University of Minnesota, Leonardo’s Basement, The Bakken Museum, Mathnasium, local Lego Robotics teams, and Saint Paul high schoolers.

Over the course of 2 hours, the Macalester team hosted a steady stream of the 200 eager families who showed up for the event. Using creative and surprisingly entertaining activities, the Mac volunteers exposed the elementary students to binary numbers, Twister-like topology contortions, robot navigation, secret message decoding, number sorting, and the infamous traveling salesman problem.

“The kids were all so excited to play with math and try to figure out the puzzles,” says Elise delMas.  “It was wonderful to see their enthusiasm for using their brains. I was helping kids with a puzzle in which they had to tie a knot in a rope without letting go of the ends, and when they finally figured it out, their faces lit up like it was the most exciting magic trick on the planet.”