BOISE, Idaho — A two-day stem conference has been held for math educators from across the country. A group of these educators developed a series of lessons that will help students be better drivers on the road.
Idaho Transportation Department, STEM Action Center, and the State Department of Education teamed together to create six algebra lessons called "Do the Math Save a Life," that use Idaho Office of Highway Safety crash data to teach algebra and data analysis skills.
"We knew that if kids could look at the data on the behaviors that contribute to car accidents and deaths of teenagers that they would be able to save lives and so literally the department of transportation staff were all about saving lives," says Dr. Catherine Mills, Math Coordinator for the Idaho State Department of Education.
The safety dashboard shows crashes that happen on Idaho roads and displays them on the dashboard. Teachers will use these lessons for things like scatter plots, frequency tables, and more.
Daniell Desjarlais is a secondary Math Instructional Specialist with Nampa School District, she says, "You can see an intersection you can look as far out as the whole state or you can filter it down to fatalities or just people not wearing seatbelts or people following too close behind."
Dr. Catherine Mills, created the idea of "Do the Math Save a Life," after she was personally affected by teen driver safety.
"My daughter who was 19 at the time just found out that one of her best Friends from high school had been killed in a car accident he fell asleep at the wheel and wasn't wearing a seatbelt and my daughter was devastated because they always reminded him to wear a seatbelt," says Dr. Mills.
This tragedy took a huge toll on her family, but Dr. Mills knew that to prevent this from happening to other teens, it had to be taught and talked about in classrooms.
"I think one of the things that's so powerful about this is how relevant people can be with this so teachers are taking it to their classroom and they can look at their community instead of it just being this theoretical place where it's like we're going to look at a big city like Boise, or we're able to look at Blackfoot or Camice County," says Josie Derrick, Lead Math Innovator, for One Stone School.
