AMESBURY — Students showed off their game-designing skills with the help of a national math program as part of Amesbury Elementary School’s STEM Day.
STEM – an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics – has been a part of school curricula for years and has seen a recent spike in popularity.
The school hosted game designers for ST Math via Zoom on Friday to supplement the core curriculum. ST Math is an instructional program for students in prekindergarten through eighth grade that uses the brain’s reasoning ability to solve mathematical problems.
This is done as students help a penguin named JiJi overcome obstacles by solving math puzzles. JiJi crosses the screen every time students successfully complete a puzzle, leading them to the next challenge.
School STEM coach Jennifer Donais said she reached out to ST Math representatives about visiting after she discovered that the students in colleague Ellen Elliot’s third-grade class found a loophole in the game.
She said students using ST Math would have two “JiJi lives” and that the students in Elliot’s classroom collaborated and found a way around losing lives even if they received a wrong answer.
Following her discovery, Donais had the students design their own ST Math games and send videos explaining their designs to ST Math so that the game designers could provide feedback during the Zoom visit Friday.
The game designers began by explaining to students how they are working to fix the loophole that was found.
Following the explanation, student groups were brought to the front of the class to receive feedback from the designers and to speak to them.
One student brought up how the inspect option in the Safari web browser could be used to mess around with code. That impressed the designers, who described the feature as an easy and accessible way to learn coding.
The designers spoke to the students about the importance of collaboration in a professional setting after one group spoke about how they reached a compromise when they disagreed.
An issue that arose when the students were designing their games was creating hints that did not give away the answer.
One of the designers, Oliver Brown, said ST Math does not provide hints but is looking to implement them.
“Maybe, we will take some tips from you guys,” Brown told the students.
The students became excited when informed they would get a sneak peek and explanation of a new ST Math game set in an ice cave where they would have to escape the “Common Denominator Monster.”
“I don’t think we’ve shown this to any kid so far,” Brown said.
Elliot told The Daily News afterward that she was very impressed with how her class handled meeting the game designers.
“The kids really embraced it as a job and they treated it as a business meeting,” Elliot said.
The teacher said she appreciated the emphasis on collaboration because of its value in all professions.
Donais noted how Amesbury has been bringing more professionals to the schools to speak with students and how she hopes to see that trend continue.
“The more you do it, the more you want to bring in those career connections,” Donais said.
Matt Petry covers Amesbury and Salisbury for The Daily News of Newburyport. Email him at: mpetry@northofboston.com.