Zion Smith, left, and Antonio Cortorreal worked with one of the visitors to our booth at the Google Geek Street Fair. (Click image to enlarge.)
The young men in our after school program work daily at the intersection of golf and science. On Thursday, they took their knowledge to the Google Geek Street Fair in Union Square Park.
The fair featured interactive booths from STEM organizations and technology companies and was designed to “inspire kids to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, math and computer science.” The American Museum of Natural History, Cooper Union, Google, Black Girls Code, Bronx Academy for Software Engineering and Pinterest were among the other organizations with booths.
For our presentation, we packed up our SAM PuttLab, a portable putting green, a laptop, putters, balls and a motion detector and drove them from Harlem to Union Square. Three students — Antonio Cortorreal, Zion Smith and Triniim Jones — ran our station, with a little help from STEM Program Co-Leaders Herbert Brown and Veeshan Narinesingh, Teaching Professional Randy Taylor, and Program Director Jeffrey Cowitt.
The fair started at noon, and we had a steady stream of adults and kids at the booth all afternoon. Visitors were greeted by Antonio, Zion and Triniim, who talked about our Foundation, explained our putting demonstration, and then ran a putting analysis for the visitors who were interested in digging into the data on their strokes.
Data from our SAM PuttLab displayed on a laptop. (Click image to enlarge.)
For a full analysis, the visitor hit seven putts. The SAM PuttLab captured data on each stroke, measuring face angle at impact (open, closed, square), putter path, swing velocity, and more. (PuttLab captures 28 parameters for every stroke it records.) Our young men also did some old-school measuring, using a tape measure to record each putt’s distance from the hole. They then entered that data into a Google sheet they had pre-programmed to generate the average, median and standard deviation for each player’s seven putts.
The players walked away with a “scorecard” showing the stats on their shot dispersion as well as data captured by the PuttLab, valuable information for perfecting a putting stroke that most golfers have never seen before.
This fair was a great day for our young men and the Foundation. They had a chance to demonstrate their STEM and golf knowledge, as well as the poise and confidence they are building every day in our program.
