WBBM NEWSRADIO
Carolina Garibay
CHICAGO — Recess looked a little different on Wednesday for students at Genevieve Melody STEM Elementary School on the West Side. After all, it’s not every day that any students in Chicago get to watch dirt bike riders speed down their school’s street.
The showcase was part of a popup from Baltimore based nonprofit B-360.
Founder Brittany Young said the organization teaches Black kids as young as 4 about STEM using dirt bikes. She said it also aims to disrupt the prison pipeline by directly investing in Black communities.
“We work to change the perception of engineers and dirt bike riders by disrupting the prison pipeline,” Young said. “We advocate for safe rider spaces, and we also are working to transform the motorsports industry because they have never thought about Black people.”
Young said the Chicago pop-up aimed to introduce kids to STEM and increase access to potential STEM opportunities.
“Chicago is just like Baltimore; we’re basically cousins,” she said. “So when we talk about access, we talk about their access, too, and they’ve been excited to see people who look like them doing cool stuff.”
At the Chicago B-360 pop-up, students participated in three different STEM and dirt bike activities.
“One was about explosions, one was to assimilate manufacturing with 3D printing, and the other was about hydrophobic and hydrophilic reactions, which is all about how to clean up oil spills,” Young said.
Young says she hopes to bring the popup to other cities across the country.
