We have had a very successful Fifth Math and Science Family Day on October 18, 2015. We had 300+ guests and more than 80 volunteers including faculty members, staff, many teacher-candidates, as well as graduate and undergraduate students from the Faculties of Education, Science, Applied Science, Let Us Talk Science, as well as volunteers outside of UBC. Many of the visitors expressed their gratitude and excitement about the event and about the Faculty of Education Community Engagement. We also collaborated with the Beaty Museum and all of our guests got discounted entry to the museum! The photos we took speak to it. I know the teacher-candidates were certainly very excited and they came out of the event with many inquiry-based teaching ideas and positive attitude about math and science.
We have been generously supported by the Faculty of Education, TEO, EDCP, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, and of course by the David F. Robitaille Professorship in Mathematics and Science Education. I hope this support will continue and we will have many more events like that in the future. THANK YOU for helping us make it happen.
Lastly, I wanted to acknowledge personally Cynthia Nicol (who spend hours if not days organizing the math side of the event) and Ann Anderson who helped to lead the math activities and whose students created a special math brochure for the guests, Doug Adler and Fred Brown who led all the chemistry activities, and fixed a lot of “unfixable” equipment, and worked tirelessly to make it happen (and who also helped to clean everything up at the end!), Michelle Tan who organized the bio room and mentored students who facilitated it, Sandra Scott who was sick during the event but who contributed a lot to its organization (her students’ Science in the Bag activities were a hit), Kwesi Yaro – our grad student who helped with the event organization and who was sponsored by the David Robitaille Chair – Dr. Samson Nashon. And most importantly, I wanted to thank our EDCP staff who helped us with many event-related activities: Anna, Saroj, Scott, Kalie, and Kirsty.
Organizing Committee 2015 Co-Chair,
Marina Milner-Bolotin