2010 Grants

 

The Academy for Social Action in Harlem, New York City

As we have in several past years, we supported programs designed by Valerie Johnson, an inspiring math and science teacher who works in New York City. Valerie formerly taught at P.S. 241 in Harlem, but this past year she moved to a new position as the Math Coach at The Academy of Social Action (www.harlemasa.org), which is also in Harlem. We funded three programs at her new school:

An architecture and building design program

Valerie runs a club at The Academy for middle-school girls that focuses on the math and science inherent in buildings (for example, scale and proportions, precision, and angles). She also emphasizes the connections between math and science with other subjects, promotes careers that impact the built environment, and tries to get the girls to connect with the world beyond their immediate community. This year, Foundation funds purchased 3-D puzzles of the White House and the Capitol Building, 3-D home planner sets, and card-stock paper. We are also funding field trips to the Empire State Building and the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum. Finally, we are paying for pizza for lunch discussions with representatives from the Society of Women Engineers.

Materials for a robotics elective

Foundation funds are supplying robotics-related materials for an existing robotics elective, including two sets of Recycled Robots kits; and three LEGO Mindstorms NXT kits, plus related accessories.

Promoting math and science in a girls advisory group:

Students at The Academy take part in gender-specific advisory groups. Valerie leads a group of 50 10th-grade girls, and she wants to promote math and science with that group. To help her, Foundation funds are paying for field trips to the famous "Bodies" exhibit and to the Hall of Science.

The Young Women’s Leadership School in Astoria, New York City

As you know, we have supported programs at The Young Women’s Leadership Network (www.tywls.org) for several years now, and every year we have expanded that support. This year was no exception: we gave TYWLN our largest grant yet -- $10,000 -- to fund an environmental science workshop and academic field experience for the entire 7th grade (75 students) at The Young Women’s Leadership School in Astoria, Queens. The program will be conducted with Christodora, a non-profit environmental science organization. This will be the first wilderness experience for many of these girls.

There are two components to the program:

Christodora assigns an environmental educator to team-teach with the science teacher at TYWLS classroom. The students work through a Christodora-designed lesson plan that covers the basic concepts of watersheds, bio-diversity and the human impact on the natural environment, as well as additional topics selected from a Christodora menu.

Once the girls have this foundation, they will go on a three-day overnight retreat at Christodora’s Manice Education Center in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. It’s an 85-acre preserve of natural woodlands, where environmental educators will teach the girls in small groups. They will study diverse ecosystems (woodlands, waterfall and bog), they will gather water samples and measure weather conditions. They can choose from a menu of field lessons that include:

  • Forest ecology
  • Tree/plant identification
  • Edible plants
  • Wildlife search
  • Geology
  • Soil formation/sampling
  • "River Ramble"
  • Wetlands exploration
  • Sensory awareness
  • Organic gardening
  • Woodland survival
  • Map and compass

The goal is to inspire girls through hands-on learning, and to give them a better understanding of an ecosystem’s processes. The girls will emerge better equipped to understand the impact of environmental disasters like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and see the relevance of environmental science to our lives.

The Foundation’s grant will enable the entire 7th grade (75 girls) to attend the program.

The Girls’ Middle School in Mountain View, California

Last year, we told you that we had found a promising new grantee: The Girls Middle School in Mountain View, California (www.girlsms.org). In 2010, we gave two grants to GMS.

"The Shaping S.T.E.M. Initiative"

This was a school-wide program to promote the girls’ engagement with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) topics and careers. It was based on recent research that proposed four pedagogical principles for engaging girls in STEM fields: tinkering, collaboration, focus on meaningful objectives, and giving girls role models.

Foundation funds provided:

  • The building materials for cars and solar panels for a "Solar Sprint" course taught during the GMS week-long "intersession" period. Students built and raced solar-powered cars.
  • The start-up costs for a F.I.R.S.T. Lego League Robotics team.
  • Spatial reasoning materials, including puzzles, a set of tangrams, wind-up cars, and complex mechanical devices to disassemble (e.g. a cuckoo clock).
  • For National Engineers Week, building materials for a school-wide engineering project involving kinetic sculptures, and a speaker panel.
  • Field trips and science excursions for 8th graders to visit two Stanford University Nano-Science Centers, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, and the Biomedical Engineering labs at Stanford.

Every one of the 152 girls at GMS benefited in some way from this grant. As Melissa Johns, Director of Development at GMS said, "Simply put, the support we received from the JAK Foundation was instrumental to our efforts to promote and improve the education of young women in math and science."

The Jasper Ridge environmental program

We are also sponsoring a new 6th-grade earth science program at GMS. In this program, the GMS 6th-graders are participating in a year-long plot study at Stanford University’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Sixteen groups of three to four girls, each led by a Stanford graduate student, will conduct a plot study within the preserve four times during the 2010-2011 academic year. The grant also included funds for a two-week stipend for one faculty member to develop the Program during this past summer.