This episode, we're joined by two of the founders of Gique, a non-profit educational organization that brings interdisciplinary opportunities to youths in the Boston area. Danielle Olson & Ashli Polanco share their journey of how their backgrounds & their shared passion for STEAM* led to the start of Gique as we know it.
*STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics
About Our Guests:
Danielle Olson is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT, and Ashli Polanco is a Ph.D. student in Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Together, along with co-founder Phil Getzen, they formed Gique, a non-profit educational organization that helps bring interdisciplinary educational opportunities to students in the Boston area.
Social Media:
Danielle Olson // Twitter
Ashli Polanco // Twitter
Gique // Official Website + Twitter + Instagram
Resources:
"Growing Youth Curiosity and Self-Confidence in STEAM with Gique" | SciArt Magazine
Science Can Dance! Program | Gique
STEAM Resources | Gique
Get Involved with Gique as a Volunteer!
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
+ Transcript
DANIELLE OLSON & ASHLI POLANCO: Thank you so much for having us!
SYNAPSE: Yeah, totally! So Danielle is a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science over at MIT and Ashli is a PhD student in chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. So first, before we even begin to touch on the awesomeness that is Gique, would you both mind telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
DANIELLE Sure! My name is Danielle Olson. I'm currently a PhD student at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and within MIT CSAIL, I'm in a specific lab called the MIT Imagination Computation and Expression Lab. And we research and develop computing systems that enable us to culturally analyze ourselves, express ourselves, and really drive forward social change. So really using technology, artificial intelligence, and our understanding of how media shapes us and how we shape media in order to build systems that enable us to bring our ideas to life about, you know, the society we want to see. And yeah, that's basically where I'm at. I think it's a really awesome opportunity to be able to combine my passion for cultural analysis, arts, as well as computer science and artificial intelligence.
ASHLI: So, I'm Ashli Polanco, and as Alexa said, I'm a PhD student in Chemical Engineering at University of Massachusetts. How I got into chemical engineering - it wasn't really expected. I never expected to be an engineer at all. Like when, if you would’ve asked me in high school, I would have said no, I don't want to be an engineer. I wanted to actually be a neurosurgeon back then. I was in love with biology initially. At the end of high school and beginning of college, I was pre-med, but I quickly learned after taking organic chemistry that I actually enjoy the mathematics behind chemistry, and I found joy in drawing out these structures - the art behind it as well, that practice of doing that, and it totally shift my view of chemistry. I thought it was really hard before that. But when I saw it applied in the laboratory and all of that - became more interested in it and I just thought it was really cool, because not many people knew how to do it, and I think that's what inspired me to study more, because there was only 10 people in my graduating class at MIT. But in such a huge school, there's so few people majored in chemistry, and I was like, I think it would be a great discipline to focus on because so few people can do it.
And I still kept that biology background. I went on after graduating to work at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. They do primarily genomics research, and I did that for a few years. I was a process development associate, so I implemented molecular biology processes into high throughput automated processes. So basically replacing - I don't want to--it's kind of a negative connotation - but replacing the research assistant. So, I knew that, you know, I couldn't stay in this field for much longer because I was technically replacing my job with robots. (laughter)
So I decided to go back to graduate school and pursue my advanced degree in chemical engineering because I got a little taste of the engineering side working at the Broad, and I thought, you know why not. And it blossomed into what I'm doing today, which is studying renewable carbon based nanomaterials that can be used for several applications such as water purification, chemical separation, solvent storage, and more.
DANIELLE: And I think what Ashli and I both have in common is the fact that we kind of zigzagged to where we are today. I think that all human beings have a continually evolving a life story, and I think that, you know, did I know that I was going to end up in a PhD program at MIT when I was in middle school and high school? No, never. But I think that in order to really understand where you're supposed to be, you just have to continually find your passion. And at every single stage of the game, whether it was, you know, an undergrad where I changed my major from mechanical engineering my freshman year to computer science my sophomore year and that led into an internship at Microsoft, which led into my full-time job there.
And then I landed on a job where I was like, my next passion is really being able to understand how do I turn these specs I'm writing as a program manager here - these ideas I'm building with businesses, with designers - how do I actually learn how to bring that idea from a pen and paper to code? Because I wanted to be able to run a start-up one day or bring whatever app idea I had to life, and I realized I had to go back to school to feel like I could empower myself. And so, Ashli and I both are like lifelong learners, and I think that's something you'll find in common with a lot of grad students.
SYNAPSE: (agreeing) Mm-hmm. So how did you two go from both of your respective academic fields to actually meeting each other and then collaborating to form a non-profit organization?
ASHLI: I'll start with a story with how we met. (Danielle: Yeah! (laughter))
You know, I'm two years older than Danielle, so we overlapped 2 years in college. We were both at MIT for undergrad, and at MIT, as you could imagine, the group of minorities at MIT is very small. If you, you know, categorize yourself as a Black woman at MIT, you automatically know all the Black women. (Danielle & Alexa: (chuckle of agreement)) You are part of a group called Black Women's Alliance. Like, that's - as soon as you get on campus, you are part of the Black Women's Alliance. So from Black Women’s Alliance, you have, you know, your Big Sisters, which is the upper classmen that you take on a Little Sister, which is a freshman - and just kind of like, take them under your wing and guide them.
Danielle was not my Little Sister, but we just was in the same program. (to Danielle) Actually, when you first came on campus, I don't think we were like friends right away. We kind of like hung out with different groups, but I noticed that, you know - I observed her from afar and I was like, I think that we have a lot of things in common. When I finally got to meet her, she was super smart and had such big ideas and I'm like, OK, I can have a crazy long intellectual conversation with this girl, but then I could also be my goofy, crazy self that is constantly dancing around the room and—
DANIELLE: (chuckle) Hip-hop--
ASHLI: Yeah, so I was a hip hop dancer also when I was at MIT, I danced with several groups. So, I was constantly in that scene. When we met, we just automatically clicked, and I loved the fact that she just had these huge ideas and had this design - I always say it to her all the time - she has this knack for design. Also, after we met, I got her a job at the Office of Minority Education. I was working there as like a office worker at the time, and she would design flyers for them and I would be so amazed of her graphic design ability and I’m like, “Teach me everything you know!”
(laughter)
ASHLI: So even though she was a younger underclassman, I was always constantly learning from her. So it was like, you know, not only were we great friends, but we constantly learn from each other.
(to Danielle) So, I guess you could tell how we started Gique.
DANIELLE: Exactly. No, I think - you know, they say that a huge part of college is not just like the books you read, but the people you surround yourself with and just the ability to really understand, like, what kind of person do I want to be? And I think learning to connect with mentors like Ashli, who became my best friend. Like, she's going to be in my wedding. You know, as my like sister--
ASHLI: (proud) I'm a bridesmaid!
DANIELLE: Yeah!
SYNAPSE: : That’s awesome!
DANIELLE: And to me, it's people that enable me to reach my full potential because we're always backing each other up. We're always helping each other grow. And Ashli's been the person that has always just given it to me straight, and I really, like - that's the type of people that you want on your team. I always say, I want to keep a really strong team around me to call me out when I need to be called out and also to keep me positive when I'm, you know, maybe in a rut mentally or going through a hard patch with my family or my friends at school.
In terms of, you know, hanging out after I actually graduated - I was in a dorm called Senior House at MIT. It was like my family, my community, right in Kendall Square. It is a dorm that has such a history and a culture. The walls are completely covered in beautiful murals, and these are people who are majoring in things like aerospace engineering, earth and planetary science, computer science, doing like, arts and painting in their spare time, bringing electronics to life to express their ideas. And to me, that's where the concept of being a Gique came from in the first place was just being around people like Ashli, being around people like Phil, our other co-founder who you know, really inspired me to understand like, I don't have to give up my passion for the arts and my passion for that part that makes us human, which I believe is our artistic side with my technical side. So we used to have conversations, like Ashli--
ASHLI: I would come over after work (Danielle: Exactly!) because I work right across the street at the Broad Institute and she was still in college. I would come after work and grab a pack of beer (Danielle: Exactly!) and we would just talk and she would - every day I would go over to her dorm, she would be so inspired. And I think it was that community – (to Danielle) I didn't even think about that - it was that community that you were in that, everybody was an artist, everybody was an engineer or scientist, as well. And they embraced all of those aspects of themselves and it brought – (to Danielle) sorry, when you was talking about Senior House, it really brought, like tingling all over my body because they actually just closed it down. So they pretty much, like, demolished the whole community. But that was really where Gique was born. Inside of that dorm, yeah. (Danielle: (agreeing) --inside of that house, actually)
DANIELLE: And to me, it was the first place not only at MIT, but I think in my young adult life, where I really felt like I don't have to give up what makes me Danielle, to be a successful engineer or scientist. I've always been the girl that wears those crazy jewelry and expresses myself with my hair, my clothes, my music. Not only that, but what I build - I went home to my parents’ house in DC this weekend and I saw a tiara around a robot I built. (Ashli: (laughter))
And that just sums me up and that sums it up what being a Gique is, is like combining my passion for being a diva with my passion for being like Bill Nye the Science Guy. (Ashli: Right!)
So anyway, that's really where Gique came from is that we decided that, you know, there's this term that we can use to describe ourselves. And so, it just started like that. We started a social media page and then we started filming interviews with people. Ashli was one of our first interview subjects. Megan Cox, who's the founder of Wink All Natural, which is now (--?) beauty based out of China. You know, she's selling cosmetics she invented out of her MIT dorm room internationally now. We have people who are neuroscientists, as well as pianists, who combine their love for music into their scientific process by empowering people who have hard of hearing to enjoy music again. So, these are people that really inspired us, and I think we just wanted to show that to the world.
ASHLI: Yeah, it was more like a lifestyle blog to start out. You know what I mean? (Danielle: Exactly, exactly.) Like, these are people with common interests, and it's cool to be both interested in the arts and sciences, and combining those things is what causes innovation. You know, that's where Apple came from, in general.
DANIELLE: And I think with Ashli specifically, you know, her own experience at MIT has shaped Gique in a really meaningful way because her own identity really is what pioneered our Science Can Dance! program.
(to Ashli) So, if you want to share about that -
ASHLI: Oh yeah, I mean, I grew up as a martial artist. I did martial arts for like 10 years growing up. And then when I was in my later teens, I started dance. I loved performing. That was a part of martial arts that I loved and was near and dear to my heart. So I said, let me pour all that into dance and see how far I could go - and joined a dance studio, and then when I went to college, just joined every hip hop team on campus--
DANIELLE: And she was amazing!
ASHLI: (laugh) --because I just love it.
DANIELLE: You can Google it, like – (proud) my best friend is amazing.
(laughter)
ASHLI: Anyways… That's why I started choreography, doing my first choreography pieces, getting that - I was actually a co-captain of my team. You know, it was the first place that I had planned and directed my own event, my own dance performance, where over 300 people attended. So it gave me that experience, and I loved - I practiced dance every single day, even though I had this crazy schedule of classes and lab and everything. That was my place of sanity was that dance studio. But in my parents’ eyes and like other people's eyes outside the dance studio, it was like, “you're wasting your time, you could be studying, why are you doing stuff that's not important, like, that's not going to get you anywhere, you need to give it up, because you need to focus on something else instead”. And I felt like, you know, it wasn't a side that was, like, respected of me.
When I would have these conversations with Danielle where you were like, “Wow, art is so empowering. Like, we could see art in everything that we do! Why—why are we suppressing this part of ourselves because of what other people think?” And I was like, you know, I think we could really do something with dance and science. We're telling a story with every single dance performance that we've done. It has a meaning behind it, has a theme, and sometimes it just tells a whole story - a story that you could get emotional to. Why can't you tell a science story through dance?
And that's when we developed this idea for Science Can Dance! and took it from there. We took about like six or seven months to plan the first one, and it was such a hit. That's when we crossed over to educational programming.
SYNAPSE: Yeah. So, to set the stage for the Science Can Dance! program, could you first describe for our listeners what your organization Gique is all about?
DANIELLE: So Gique, as Alexa mentioned, we're a nonprofit that's based out of Boston, and we exist to empower Boston area students to really embrace their own unique learning styles, to look at their ways of learning as assets, looking at their cultures and their identities as assets, and translating technical concepts through creative expressions. And we believe that our programming is unique because we really look at culture in the center of the classroom, and we empower students to really understand, enjoy, and excel in STEAM and really self-identify as, “How can I really combine my specific passions with these different STEAM skills to carve my own path?”. Just like we did, in spite of the traditional career path that we might have been exposed to. So, we really want to champion a world that sees the arts and sciences as critical, not just one or the other, to developing well-rounded people. Because in the future, we have a lot of things that we need to tackle, we have a lot of global problems that we're leaving for the next generation, and how can we equip them to tackle them? We need them to be creative innovators. (Ashli: Right.) So, Science Can Dance! and our after-school program are the two ways that we kind of deliver programming to Boston--
ASHLI: Right. So there's actually three ways that we accomplish our mission: the first one is we run community STEAM booths across the cities like Cambridge Science Festival, Boston Public School Science Fair. Anytime that there's a festival with STEM or science--
DANIELLE: Or arts!
ASHLI: --or arts, we're there. We have a booth. We have volunteers go, and we run activities, whether it's a typography booth - we do the art and science of typography. We do virtual reality booths, now that we have a virtual reality expert, and many more. So that's one.
So the second one is that we piloted a weekly fall and spring, always like out of school time, STEAM program at The Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester. So we did this for a year, and it went really well. What we did was we took all that data that we collected from the impact of that program, and we published it in a paper. And we hope to bring this program back really soon, once we get substantial funding.
And then the third way is our Science Can Dance! Program, as you know. We first started doing this as one-off workshops, which were like one to three hours long, depending on how much content we put into it. This summer, we tried something new, and we did a whole five part series that was themed STEAM, obviously, and each workshop was different about a different STEAM topic. And we partnered with the Boston Public Library to host all of our workshops at different library locations, so that students all across the city of Boston could go to the workshops.
DANIELLE: And the topics this summer were incredible. We had guest speakers come, we had different organizations come and do demos. So the first workshop was a science topic, which was about organic chemistry. We had Professor Cathy Drennan from MIT speak. On the second one, we had a technology workshop on self-driving cars, so students actually engaged with a researcher from MIT CSAIL, called Leilani Gilpin, and we talked about, how does that technology work? They learned about, how does the LIDAR detection system work? And then the next workshop was engineering. We did some artificial intelligence machine learning and programming discussions. We went on to talk about product design in our art workshop and then finally the golden ratio in our last workshop.
Even Science Cheerleader, which is an organization similar to Gique, they really play with the stereotypes about who engineers and scientists can be by providing representations of NFL and NBA cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers on their website. And that was really near and dear to my heart because I was an MIT cheerleader. I was the captain of the MIT cheerleading squad my junior year of college, and we were the first team to ever compete at nationals. And so even just the experience of walking in an MIT uniform around cheerleading nationals – like, that was an experience just dealing with challenging those stereotypes and people really understanding wow, people exist that do cheerleading and also love science? (Ashli: Right!) You know, that you realize--
ASHLI: Like, they're so amazed that I danced, and “people dance there?!” Like, yes, people move their bodies.
(laughter)
DANIELLE: Yeah, that’s powerful! When you can see a little girl and she says, “Oh my gosh, I can do both? Like, I can be in cheer and I can love science and be a math nerd at the same time?” Like, that really is a powerful concept. And to me, it's really – I don’t know - inspiring.
SYNAPSE: (agreeing) Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's one of the amazing things about promoting the intersection between science and arts and culture is - it's not just to develop ourselves as people and to explore different perspectives that we can apply to various realms of our own lives, but to see that inspiration in young kids, too, is so wonderful like – For example, a personal anecdote. You know, growing up for me, my female role models in science or in sci-fi were mostly centered around exclusively science. I didn't really get much exposure to, “You can be a scientist and do this.” I didn't see that many roles for me when I was growing up. And I wish I had!
And so, this is a great program. I'm really glad that you're doing this to expose kids to the idea that humans are multi-dimensional creatures, and we don't just exist in one field. We exist in so many other kinds, as well. So, I think it’s really great that you're doing this, and you're also enabling young people to see themselves represented in all these areas. You know, as a kid, to be able to go to a workshop and see a female engineer or a female researcher or other people who have similar cultural heritages or backgrounds as yourself, that's awesome because you can see yourself in those roles in the future. And I think for a lot of kids, that can be a very significant part of their childhood, a really big contributing factor to what they end up doing in life later on.
SYNAPSE: So how did you go from - you said it started out as a lifestyle blog for Gique - how did you go from kind of blogging about it and sharing your experiences to actually forming an organization? Like, what was that process like for you? Danielle: It was like a lot based on feedback and just conversations. I think the benefit of being founders with your best friend is that you hang out a lot, and when you're nerds like us, you love talking about this stuff. So, a lot of it was we put out social media posts, videos, and then we got feedback like, “I love this blog. I really identify with it”. You know, people of all ages were saying, “I’m a Gique.” So we really wanted to bring ourselves together--
ASHLI: Right, I think it was once we filed for the nonprofit that we really switched gears and was like alright, we're in education. We're an educational nonprofit, and it was after the first Science Can Dance! program workshop that we ran, and people started approaching us like saying, “Alright, let's get a workshop here! Let's get a workshop there!” The Boys and Girls Club was the first ones to approach us and said we are - you could start a program tomorrow –
DANIELLE: “What do you need?”
ASHLI: “What do you need and we got you.” Right? That's when we were like, OK, we have something here. We have to make sure we do this the right way. We filed to get the nonprofit. We got the nonprofit, and then Danielle went ham in the summertime [laughs] and wrote like a whole entire curriculum for the fall. And you know, me and Phil helped as much as we could, but it was really Danielle and her sister, who’s a teacher for - she taught for Teach for America for a few years, she's teaching--
DANIELLE: She's a learning literacy specialist now in a public-- a Friend School in Philadelphia.
ASHLI: Right. So they went together, stayed up nights writing this curriculum to teach these kids for the fall so we could have a program. And, you know, we really was just learning as we went. And me, Phil, and Danielle would just - we would run the (laughs) hands on experiments at home, at her apartment first to test it out, to make sure we knew what we were doing, one, but also that it actually worked! So, we were in her apartment trying to make 3D holograms and like trying to figure out, like, how these things worked! (laughing)
DANIELLE: (laughing) It was a wet lab in my bedroom.
ASHLI: --In her bedroom! And we got all the lights off, you know--
DANIELLE: Probably not a good idea with the fumes!
(laughter)
ASHLI: It was so funny, but it was good times, like, it was time that we spent together as friends, but also we were doing like this really cool stuff and we brought it to the kids and they were so amazed. And we brought them on field trips - so we used our network at MIT to say, “Hey, we have these kids, can we bring them to your lab? Can we bring them to the art asylum? Can we bring them to your music studio? Can we bring them to the MIT Museum?” We brought them all over the place. And they loved it, (Danielle: They loved it.), they soaked it up. So yeah, it was really that year - I think it was 2015 (Danielle: It was in 2016, yeah) --yeah! that it was like, alright, everything shift, we’re an educational nonprofit now.
DANIELLE: And at the end of that spring of 2016, the State Senator of Massachusetts, Sonia Rosa Chang-Díaz - her showing up at our end-of-semester ceremony - that kinda made it real for us, in a way? Like, wow, this is important. (Ashli: And she was impressed.) This is so important, like, this is not just us. You know, we just wanted to do something good for our communities. We believe that there's a lot of issues of injustice in our society. Myself, Ashli, and Phil are very much dedicated to fighting against that, and we do it through creating amazing experiences for kids in the community to empower themselves with knowledge and education and great, awesome expressive art. And I think that seeing the Senator say, like, ‘We need this for the next generation workforce, we need these types of experiences’, really made us realize this is a bigger – like, we need to make this scalable. So really trying to take it to the next level.
ASHLI: Right. And then – so, if you want to see any of the data that we collected or how we ran the program and even down to like all the workshops that we taught - you could find it on SciArt magazine, we have a article on there all about STEAM. Their brand new STEAM issue just came out.
SYNAPSE: That’s awesome. So you guys have been running Gique now for how long - how many years?
DANIELLE: It’ll be--
ASHLI: Since 2014, right?
DANIELLE: 2013. So it’ll be four years this October, yeah.
SYNAPSE: Wow, that's crazy. So, what have your experiences been like doing this for four years? Have you experienced any kind of pushback from people who are kind of confused at how you can combine all these different things together? But also on the positive side, too, have you experienced any kind of remarkable moments that have come out of this project, that kind of stand out to each of you?
ASHLI & DANIELLE: Both.
DANIELLE: I think, yeah, both! And I think - it's just, to me, it's amazing that something that came out of this conversation and something we just thought about has become something that kids in our communities are identifying as. Like one of my friends, she's an artist - her son came to one of our summer Science Can Dance! Programs and you know, he was very shy at first, very hesitant about the workshop. And she texted me and was like, he's been wearing his Gique shirt around the house all weekend, like, he can't stop talking about it—
ASHLI: And he came to another workshop after—
DANIELLE: --another one with his sister. And just, you know, it fuels me to keep going. It keeps me motivated that, wow, we're actually doing something. We're providing examples. We're inspiring kids to really look at themselves and say, “I’m awesome! I can do all of the things I wanna do.”
ASHLI: Right. I agree – like, we get some skepticism either from, sometimes the parents are skeptics, they come up to me before the class like, “I don't know how you're going to do this. It's going to be interesting how this turns out”. (laughs) Or like, “I don't know how you made that connection,” or whatever. Or the kids are even skeptical about it, like, they'll tell me, “Oh, I don't-- I don't know if I wanna do this or I don't know if I wanna participate.” But then, after they do it they're like, “Ohh my gosh, this was really fun and I see the connection. I see how you're doing this, and I see –“.
I try to even, like, connect the music, even the theme of the song to the theme of the whole lesson behind it and just the process that I go through when I make my choreography and I think about my lesson plans and all of that, it really - it's fun for me and it's a truly creative process. Like, I'm always inputting information, constantly watching dance, I'm constantly practicing dance, I'm constantly freestyling dance at home, listening to a range of different songs to figure out which one fits best with the feeling of this lesson, or the feeling of the scene that I'm trying to go for.
And for me, it's kept the dance aspect of my life still very present, even though I don't have the time to go to a dance workshop. I don't have the time to perform anymore. I don't have the time to be part of a team necessarily - I can't commit those hours. But I can do it at home, and I can create these things that I teach in workshops, and it keeps it in my life.
So both - there's been lessons of, like, there's been the skeptics and then there's been like, wow, this is so helpful to the students, but also very helpful to me, and then helpful to her. And I also want to teach other people how to do it, too, so that's another thing is I'm trying to figure out how to package the process that I go through and teach others how to teach these workshops, too, because I don't want to be the only one teaching it.
DANIELLE: I really just think of it as, the biggest skeptics that think - a lot of people have said, like, “This would not help me. I would not enjoy learning concepts in this way”. But I think that we have a mainstream educational system that can serve some learners, and we have other learners who have bodily intelligence, musical intelligence, rhythmic and mathematical intelligence. I know some of the best musicians that I know that didn't do great in their math classes, but they can calculate like exactly how many hits they need to--
ASHLI: --Or they could pick up some choreography.
DANIELLE: Yeah! And it's just, you know, some sorts of learning that are different to other people. Some people find different ways of learning more intuitive. And I think for me, I used to think, like, something maybe was wrong with the way I was learning, but I just - you know, when you learn how to teach yourself new material - because our after-school program was continually a process of learning new stuff that we weren’t experts in. We're trying to inspire our students to not be afraid of learning things that seem hard or are mystified and really just break it down in a way that works for you.
So really, it's just - Gique is a way of looking at the world. Like, you know, seeing the geometry and the equations that we could use to express, I don't know, the designs that we have in our hair with braids and cornrows. Being able to look at fabrics from Cameroon, where my mom is from, and see equations. Being able to understand like, when I watch the Black Panther movie, “Oh, how could I actually build that technology as a prototype? Like, I want that bracelet that has really cool AI technology. How would that work? Let me Google it.” So, it's really about just fueling this lifelong thirst for knowledge and curiosity.
SYNAPSE: Yeah, totally. It's interesting to think of different learning styles because I think it's a concept that many of us might not be aware of or exposed to unless, for example, it comes up in a class like you might hear about it from a professor or a teacher. But growing up, I feel like a lot of kids don't know that the way they're being taught might not necessarily be the way they intuitively can grasp knowledge. And unfortunately, sometimes, yeah, it leads to kids thinking, you know, maybe something's wrong with me. Like, I can't learn this material. Maybe I'm not smart enough to do math or smart enough to do engineering, but it just has to be translated to a language that they're familiar with.
ASHLI: So, there's one thing that we touch upon in our paper that is multimodal representation. People that are multimodal learners, that you have to see it in more than one representation in order for you to understand it. So, you can’t just read it in a paragraph and understand it. You have to see a picture or a video or an art form or, you know, even some abstract art to be like, “Oh! OK, I see how this fits together.” So, I definitely agree with you there. And I think it does need to be incorporated more in like early childhood, but yeah.
So, we're definitely advocates of bringing art back into the classroom because there's been studies out there that show the most successful people in STEM - which everybody’s pushing “Go to STEM! Be successful in STEM!” - but the most successful people in STEM also were artists!
DANIELLE: In childhood. (Ashli: In childhood.) Violin lessons, piano lessons, singing, dance, whatever it was.
SYNAPSE: So, what kind of upcoming events will Gique be hosting in the near future, if anyone in the Boston area wants to go and check them out? Or maybe even opportunities for people to help out if this is a cause that they think they might be interested in supporting?
DANIELLE: So we just wrapped up an awesome summer running the STEAM workshop at the Boston Public Library. This fall, we're looking to, like Ashli mentioned, run a bunch of STEAM pop-up booths. So we partnered with EL STEAM, which is an extended learning STEAM program through Cambridge Public Schools, to provide STEAM booths and experiences throughout the year - September through December. And then you know, after the break, in the spring time, we run booths.
So if you want to become a volunteer, you can visit our website and sign up on our registration form. You can also e-mail us if you have any questions. But also we're currently collaborating with different organizations around the Boston area to just plan more Science Can Dance! and other workshops. So we do various collaborations depending on who would like to partner, what students are in need and are expressing interest. So, if you are interested in collaborating with us or becoming a sponsor, we're currently looking to identify a financial sponsor for our upcoming after-school program.
ASHLI: A couple of other things that we're also looking into for the next year is – so, being a volunteer is for Gique is more than just a regular volunteer. You get to learn like really cool things, you get a free T-shirt, you get to meet awesome people that have the same interest as you. It's almost like a networking opportunity because you get to meet other STEM professionals because it’s usually that pool that engages with us because we're mission based. But also, I'm looking to recruit some Science Can Dance! instructors. You know, people that are both interested in STEM but also dance and do choreography, because I want to start training other people to teach in the same exact way. And I feel like other people's perspectives could also add more to the content.
Oh, we have events for adults, as well! We didn't even mention that. One of the ways that we also got our name out there was our amazing Art and Science of Beer event that we have at least once a year. We've done it at the Cambridge Science Festival. We've done it at different breweries across Cambridge in Boston. We're probably going to have one at The Cambridge Science Festival this year, we already have been talking to the breweries. We partnered with (--?). We partnered with Guinness. We partnered with Mystic Brewery out of Cambridge, and this year – yeah, so it's a new micro brew. Check our website to see details on that. It's a 21+ event, but we go and bring experts that actually brew beer and go through the whole process, the science, the art behind beer making, labeling, bottling, all that cool stuff. So, if you’re a beer fanatic come out to that – those are really popular.
DANIELLE: And if you're a nerd like me and choose your beer based on how pretty the label is, you can come talk to me about the beer graphic design. (laughter) Cause yeah, Alexa pointed to herself, too! Yes! There's some really cool graphic design out there, so you can come check out some of the best graphic design out there and talk about what makes it so great.
SYNAPSE Awesome! Yeah, so, listeners, you can find more information about all these events and opportunities over on their website at www.gique.me and also on Twitter with the user handle @giqueme. Do you guys have any social media accounts you'd like to share with listeners as well?
DANIELLE: Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter. Phil, one of our co-founders, is actually a product designer at Twitter. So, I'm a personal fan of Twitter. You can find me @hellodanio.
ASHLI: You can find me on Twitter @ashli_dances. And any of the Gique social media, as well. We also have Instagram, as well.
SYNAPSE: Fantastic. So @hellodanio and @ashli_dances. And listeners, you can find these links and other STEAM resources in the show notes for this episode over on our website at synapsescience.com, we'll have a transcript available for this episode, as well, for your convenience.
Thank you two so much for taking some time out of your day to chat with us!
DANIELLE: It was really fun to talk to you. (laughs)
All music tracks are attributed to Kevin MacLeod and are licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. All audio clips included in the podcast are used for nonprofit, educational purposes. The Synapse Science Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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