This eight-week-long summer school project will use the anthropological, biological, geological, and ecological contexts of the important African World Heritage site of Ishango to teach STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) basic concepts in science and mathematics to pre-college students. Ishango, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, became famous through the discovery in 1959 of the “Ishango Bone,” an intricately incised 25,000-year-old artifact thought to be the earliest evidence of mathematical thought in the world. It bears three columns of marks, one of which are the prime numbers between 10 and 20, and others so arranged as to represent the first known groupings of numbers into "bases." The artifact was the inspiration for the opening scene of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the focus of a STEM European Union educational program sponsored by Belgium in 2006 targeting disadvantaged Afro-European youth. The ICSM Ishango Project will be the first U.S. launch of such an Africa-focused STEM program, intended to engage African-American students, but open to all. Preparing students in STEM subjects beginning in elementary school is essential to priming the healthcare educational pipeline and redressing the historical disparities that still plague modern medicine. This program will utilize a curriculum developed uniquely for it by mathematicians and scientists and will be offered both in-person in Virginia and asynchronously on the web. Cost of the eight-week program is $400 (online) and $800 (in-person).
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