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03/14/2015 12:00 AMDuring Emma’s Senior year of high school she worked on achieving her Girl Scout Gold Award. The Girl Scout Gold Award represents the highest achievement in Girl Scouting. Open only to girls in high school, this prestigious award challenges girls to change the world—or at least her corner of it, but solving a community problem—not only in the short term, but for years into the future.
The issue, which Emma hoped to solve, is that many students do not find math "fun". Through talking with students and teachers, Emma has found that students do not find math an enjoyable subject and therefore they do not have an interest in pursuing careers in Mathematics. This poses short term and long term problems. When students lose interest in Math, they may not study as hard and therefore perform poorly on math tests, which becomes a vicious cycle of students not enjoying the subject and doing poorly in the subject area. The long term impact of this lack of interest is that there is a growing need for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers our country has a shortage of students prepared to meet this demand. For her Gold Award Project Emma helped to make seventh and eighth graders more interested in math.
For Emma’s project, she created a Math Club at Branford Walsh Intermediate School located in Branford. During the spring of 2014, Emma met with the principal of the intermediate school and various intermediate school math teachers to arrange the logistics of the creating this club. Every Tuesday, Emma and a group of Branford High School high school students go to the middle school to work with a group of seventh and eighth graders after school. Over the course of the 2014-2015 school year, Emma and her team worked with the middle school club members to learn and have fun with math. Topics such as the math mathematics behind the stock market, dimensional analysis, geometric patterns of snowflakes, graphing and so much more were covered during the meetings.
Emma hopes that the math club will be continued next year by her high school team members and the middle school.
If you are interested in learning more about Emma and or her gold award project, please do not hesitate emailing her at ependl-robinson@branfordschools.org