For 18 years, fifth-graders have competed at the University of the Pacific to show their skills in the annual Math Steeplechase.
For some students, it’s their first-ever college experience.
More than 1,000 fifth graders from 13 elementary schools from across the Northern Central Valley attended this year’s competition on Thursday, April 23, rotating between three stations at the Alex G. Spanos Center, the Wendell Phillips Center lawn and the field hockey field.
The event is hosted every year by Benerd College, Pacific’s Department of Mathematics and Pacific Athletics.
Kyle Harkness, assistant dean of operations for Benerd College at the University of the Pacific, described the event as exciting, fast-paced and competitive.
“(The event) is an opportunity to engage with students in the local community, give them an opportunity to come here, have a Pacific experience, participate in a little friendly competition, have the ability to collaborate together, utilize teamwork, and hopefully, if they do a good enough job, they’ll come home with a big trophy that they can bring back to their school,” Harkness said.
Harkness said since then, the program has doubled in size. They originally started with about 500 students and on Thursday, they were expecting “a smidge under a thousand” students.
“We’re really excited this year because we have an opportunity to partner with the San Francisco 49ers. They’re actually running one of our stations, the science station, and I believe they’re showing the kids how to construct like a football. We’re excited about that. The students come, they basically alternate through three stations. One is math focused, one is science focused, and one is athletics focused,” Harkness said. “They’re utilizing not only their brains, but their bodies as well.”
‘Open their minds and try to be creative’
The science station the 49ers Foundation facilitated during the Math Steeplechase was called “Forces of Football Flight,” where students had to work in groups to build a football out of general materials.
“They are building a football here where they’ll test out the forces of flight to see if it gets through the quarterback net, but we give them all the materials and they’re all generic materials. They’re construction paper, regular paper, bubble wrap, cotton balls, anything that you can find at home and just keeping it an open-ended activity for them to just be creative and curious to build their own footballs,” said Sara Jin, manager for 49ers EDU. “I’m not trying to give them a whole lot of instructions, but just giving them enough so that they can open their minds and try to be creative in what they want to do.”
Jin said the 49ers Foundation’s mission is to educate and empower Bay Area youth and through partnering with the University of the Pacific they are able to impact students who might not always get to go on 49ers Foundation fieldtrips.
“It’s one activity kids might not realize the science and the math that is behind it, but it’s a fun activity,” Jin said. “They can learn about how forces apply to the football and how we use that in the game of football in a fun way that gets them going hands-on and just active.”
‘Fun, challenging, and exciting’
Math professor Dennis Parker has been involved with the Math Steeplechase for the past 20 years, he said. For three years, the event didn’t take place during the Coronavirus pandemic.
He described the event as “fun, challenging, and exciting.”
Parker is the person behind the math problems during the math portion of the event.
“I try to design problems that are conducive to group work, where not all the work is done by just one student, but they work together. I focus on fifth-grade content, what they’ve studied. In fifth grade, it’s primarily the arithmetic of whole numbers, fractions, and decimals, and then measurement like area, perimeter, and volume. I try to vary the level of difficulty. Part of the task is easy, but other parts are more challenging,” Parker said. “Then the other factor is it’s time limited. They have 5 minutes to complete it. I have to make sure that it’s reasonable that they can solve it in 5 minutes.”
Parker said the students rotate through five tables. Each table had a set of related tasks.
“For example, one is six different problems involving volume, calculating the volume of a geometric figure and another table will have some other tasks, like area and perimeter,” Parker said. “Another task is the arithmetic of whole numbers, fractions and decimals.”
Parker’s message to the students who may or may not be good in math is to be patient.
“My message would be to be patient with yourself if you don’t understand something immediately. That is the case with a lot of people,” Parker said. “Just try to be persistent and keep working and don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand something.”
Ann Breitler, mom of Carson Breitler and a former copy editor at The Record, attended her first Math Steeplechase as a chaperone. While she did not know much about the competition, she said it was nice that Pacific puts on events like the Math Steeplechase.
“It’s nice to know that we have the institution, that we have UOP here to put on events like this for kids that hopefully will go to college and they can see the students and the campus and they can kind of get a little bit of a feel for what it’s all about and what it’s like to be here,” Breitler said.
She said it was fun to see her son excited about science and math.
John Muir Elementary School was this year’s Benerd’s 18th annual Math Steeplechase winner. K.I. Jones Elementary School placed second and Brookside Elementary School third, Pacific officials said Thursday.
Last year’s winner of the Benerd’s 17th Annual Math Steeplechase was Brookside Elementary School.
To learn more about the University of the Pacific or Benerd College, visit pacific.edu.
Record reporter Angelaydet Rocha covers business and community news in Stockton and San Joaquin County. She can be reached at arocha@recordnet.com or on Twitter @AngelaydetRocha. To support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.
This article originally appeared on The Record: University of the Pacific hosts 5th graders for annual Math Steeplechase
Reporting by Angelaydet Rocha, The Stockton Record / The Record
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