In the Summer 2020, in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic, we partnered with a dance studio in Santa Ana, Academy of Dance, to create a unique educational program for Elementary and Middle Schools, called “STEM through Dance” (funded by NSF grant DMS-1812601, PI Dominik Wodarz). The goal of this endeavor is to find a way to explain STEM concepts to K-12 students in a non-traditional way.
This approach aims to enhance K-12 education, focusing on URM students from underserved communities. The first experimental step in this effort was to create five videos that explained biological concepts at the level of middle school, by using dance.
Five short videos were created, where music and dance were combined with some text (written or spoken) to explain the following topics (taken from different parts of the curriculum):
Conservation, and
The videos are between 3 and 5 minutes long. The dances were conceptualized jointly by UCI and Academy of Dance team members, choreographed by the teachers at the Academy of Dance, and performed by current students at the Academy of Dance, all of whom are high school students. The videos show that complex (and even ”boring”) topics from elementary/middle school science could be explained in an innovative, creative way that is aesthetically pleasing and striking, and is more likely to make an impression on students than a conventional text book or even a science video.
The program benefits the community on three different levels: (1) Immediate: it exposes members of the dance studio to concepts in STEM; (2) Local: it is made available to local schools, including Santa Ana, Tustin, and Irvine school districts; (3) Global: it is made available globally online for educators throughout the world.