GenSTEM: Math Workshop at Baan Hathai Rak

On a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning, we travelled to Baan Hathai Rak. Located on the outskirts of Bangkok, Baan Hathai Rak is a girls orphanage with wonderful, welcoming staff and girls who impressed us with their vitality and friendliness.

The workshop began ahead of scheduled time, seeing as the girls were enthusiastic and ready to learn. They each chose a maths topic they were unsure about for us to explain and follow up with the prepared worksheets. It was delightful to sit next to the girls and guide them through algebraic and geometric questions.

For the second part of the workshop, the girls engaged in a mathematical treasure hunt (inspired by the treasure hunts we had done at school when we were their age). Brin explained how the game worked and how to do the solving equations questions on it. Then, the girls had fun running around and competing against each other - the winning team had the first pick for the snacks we had brought.

Although the workshop ran an hour longer than anticipated, we were extremely glad to have gone there. Some of the girls had wanted to continue with more maths, too, and all of them took the extra worksheets we had printed to do later in their own time. As we were leaving, they gave us a sweet goodbye and asked us to come again.