Perla Myers
College of Arts and Sciences
School of Engineering
USD faculty in Engineering, Mathematics, and Theatre will create a course where USD students will use an interdisciplinary approach to create low-cost STEAM enrichment kits that will foster early mathematical interest, confidence, and identity. Kits are a generic term for any user-application manipulatives that will be developed to help facilitate mathematics exploration. There is typically a “one-size fits all” approach to the creation and use of enrichment kits, which exacerbates educational disparities. With the diverse perspectives represented in the class and community partnership, students in Prof. Teshome's THEA 201 The Creative Mind course will be trained to use theatre as an ethnographic tool to collaborate with pregnant and parenting teens of Mark Twain High School to engineer STEAM enrichment kits that incorporate their stories with mathematical thinking and pedagogy.