BetaNYC is happy to announce our collaboration with John Ericsson Middle School 126 (JEMS 126) on their 2025 S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) project, through our Mapping for Equity initiative (M4E–read more here)!
Annually, JEMS 126 hosts a school-wide challenge to encourage students to tackle issues affecting their communities through field activities, STEM analysis, and artistic visioning. BetaNYC was introduced to JEMS 126 by City Council Member Lincoln Restler of District 33 (where JEMS resides) in early January. We later kicked into high gear on February 10, when our all-stars Dimitri and Naeema led an introductory Mapping for Equity teach-in for educators on-site in Greenpoint and shared our M4E curriculum and workshop tools. They then joined forces with project leaders at JEMS 126 for a brief planning period spent curating a full course of M4E-themed student activities!
On February 26th, we launched a pilot with their 8th-grade student body! We were overjoyed to introduce students to the concepts of local activism, open-space equity, and a mini field-trip mapping public amenities in the open spaces around their school. A smaller group of students even added the features they mapped alongside their peers to OpenStreetMap–the world’s premier open-source, freely editable map!
Caption: 8th-grade students import the data they collected on amenities in their school grounds onto OpenStreetMap!
Following this successful pilot, JEMS formally commenced the 2025 S.T.E.A.M. challenge for 6th and 7th graders during Open Data Week 2025! We were thrilled to learn that the entire 6th-grade experienced a dedicated field mapping day on March 27th, spent exploring the playgrounds they frequent daily with new eyes. More recently, on April 1st, Dimitri and Naeema joined JEMS educators Diamond Rodriguez and Nicolas Vasquez in leading an exciting final mapping session with the 7th-grade, empowering students to explore and re-imagine the public amenities in outdoor spaces near their school. Over 100 members of JEMS’s socio-economically diverse student community (92% of students identify as nonwhite, and share a mean economic need index of 89%) have officially mapped for Equity!
We celebrate the incredible journey of our field activities with JEMS 126 students. Still, in the following weeks, they continued to examine and reimagine their local open spaces by proposing public amenities to add, building a budget plan to reform their local playground with these amenities, and even building a three-dimensional art piece of what their ideal playground would look like! It’s been amazing to witness their curiosity and aspirations grow so far, and we can’t wait to see how they use these insights to push for meaningful change in their community as their S.T.E.A.M. Challenge project comes to fruition!
