Roman Britain for Latin Teachers

In 2019, I attended the ACL Summer Institute in New York City where I heard James Watson, a British Latin teacher, talk about his travels to Roman archaeological sites in his home country of England. I was intrigued because in the Latin textbook I use, called the Cambridge Latin Course, there is an entire story arc that takes place in ancient Britannia. I was struck with a curiosity to see the places James talked about and more. That talk started me on my own story arc.

In 1995, I was fortunate to receive a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Greece where I participated in the summer session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for 6 weeks. In this program, students and teachers traveled to and learned about archaeological sites all over Greece and Crete. At the sites, we heard from actual archaeologists, usually the lead on that particular project or dig site. One of my most vivid memories from that trip is being told to go under the rope at the Parthenon where we climbed up a very tall ladder to touch the remaining parts of the marble frieze! In the school's famous Gennadius Library, I touched the journals of Heinrich Schliemann! In the agora, my class heard from the leading archaeologist, John Camp, while actually at the archaeological site! That's how awesome this program was in getting students close to the actual archaeology. I learned so much on that trip.

In 1996, the gods blessed me yet again when I earned a scholarship to participate in a comparable summer program in Italy at the American Academy in Rome. More memorable experiences and learning followed including walking around the streets of ancient Pompeii, experiencing the Pantheon on a quiet morning before the crowds arrived, and learning about Roman inscriptions. Another amazing experience!

Side note of importance: if you're interested in either of these programs, there are wonderful sources of funding out there. You can find a complete list of scholarships for attendance at the summer session of AAR right here and of ASCSA right here. I want to reiterate that these two programs added to my classical education enormously. I would not be the teacher I am today without these experiences. Thus, I was so terribly disappointed to learn that there was not a similar program, regularly offered, in England to assist classics teachers in exploring the significant Roman sites there. To be fair, the Vergilian Society will be offering just such a tour for teachers in the summer of 2024, but this program is not an annual one.

As you can probably guess, I decided to design my own tour of the Roman archaeological sites in the UK. I enjoyed immensely the process of researching the sites and then planning the itinerary, but before that, I had to secure funding. If you're doing the same thing, you'll want to look into three organizations that offer funding for a teacher who is "designing your own" travel study experience:

The Society for Classical Studies offers numerous options. The National Latin Exam offers the Christine Sleeper Educational Travel Award. I was fortunate enough to get scholarships from both organizations. That funding paid for most of my trip! Extra money acquired through speaking engagements and writing assignments for the past few years related to my Teacher of the Year (Louisiana 2021) status allowed my husband to accompany me as my driver. (Trust me - I needed one.)

Through research, reading, and listening to the English Heritage Podcast, I designed this itinerary starting in London, heading east, and then making a big circle around all of Britain. As far as I can tell, it worked out great. I missed a few sites that I will get back to later, but for the most part, I saw everything I hoped to see. You can see my actual itinerary here.

Because I'm a nerd, and because I like to help, I've created a Website called Roman Britain for Latin Teachers. This project gave me an opportunity to review my pictures, read books I bought, and relive the adventure - all things necessary to set the learning in my own mind. On this site, you'll find all kinds of information about how to plan your own tour and prepare for it, how to incorporate Britannia into your Cambridge Latin Course lessons, and how to use my museum and site pictures in your classroom. I hope it helps you! Now get yourself to Britain!

Professional ENvelopment

Summer is halfway over. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

It started at the end of May with a few days on the beach helping my daughter and her friends celebrate their graduation from high school. I cooked for them, but other than that, I spent my time literally staring at the ocean and listening to the waves. I guess I needed that. The beach was quickly followed by a jam-packed epic trip to visit the archaeological sites of Roman Britain. I'll do another post about that soon.

Besides "resting" most teachers spend their summers learning how to be better teachers. It's what we do, and I'm no different. I LOVE to learn new stuff especially when I don't have the pressures of work/teaching to worry about. My trip to England was exactly that, a time to learn without worry.

Now, I'm sitting at MSY waiting for my flight to depart for the annual Summer Institute of the American Classical League. I attended this conference sporadically for decades. For the past few years, I've gone every year to present my work on Myth Makers and Roman Technology, classes I've been developing. I seem to know so many more people there now, and what used to be professional development has turned into professional "envelopment". I made that word up. It's kinda like work but really more like friends that you know through work that spur you on to continue learning and loving teaching classics. You're enveloped by a sense of fun and excitement to see them and learn from them.

I'll be presenting three sessions:

Hands-on History: Roman Board Games and Dice Boxes

Come play a game with me! In this workshop, you’ll learn how to create and play three Roman board games that you can teach to your students. Then, you’ll participate in a Roman STEM challenge in which you and a partner will design and build an ancient Roman-style dice box to use in playing dice games. Utilizing simple and cheap supplies (all provided for you), you’ll have a ton of fun and walk away with engaging activities that you can integrate into your regular Latin classes or use as a stand-alone club experience. Can't participate in person? Don't worry - I'll demonstrate how to play these games online too, and the STEM challenge is one that can be done at home with simple supplies from around your house.

Hands-on History: Write Like a Roman

Explore ancient writing! In this workshop, you’ll learn how to write like ancient Romans and Greeks by exploring the tools they used. After learning about the textual and archaeological evidence for different types of writing tools and materials, you’ll experience writing on papyrus and wax tablets, using squid ink, and making your own oak gall ink. All supplies will be provided - participants will receive a stylus, a small piece of papyrus, and their own container of ink. You’ll walk away with engaging activities that you can integrate into your regular Latin classes or use as a stand-alone club experience.

Engagement and Inclusion Through Narratives and Games

(I'm joining others for a segment of this one. Can you guess which part is mine? LOL) The Latin classroom can be a place of fun and imagination, and this workshop incorporates those ideas in three ways. The first presenter will speak about the power of stories to capture the imaginations of students. Attendees will receive an adapted text of an inscription to study the life of an accomplished woman in the Late Republic. The second part of the workshop will be a presentation on the medieval correspondence known as G. Unice Sue Rose, an erotic correspondence written from one nun to another in medieval Germany. Attendees will receive an adapted version and two brief activities related to the text. The third part of the workshop will feature a presentation on the games that Romans played. Attendees will learn how to make a tiny game of ROTA, a game that Roman soldiers often played and that teachers can use to teach Roman counting vocabulary in Latin class or to learn about the lives of these ancient gamers.

I'll be using a lot of hands-on supplies for these sessions so I've had to bring an entire suitcase full of crazy stuff like squid ink, cardboard scissors, and tree bark. I can't wait to see what TSA has to say about it all!

In addition to learning and presenting, I'll also be receiving a special award: the 2023 Charles Humphreys Award for Innovative Pedagogy. Here's the description: "The American Classical League has established this award in memory of Charles Humphreys to recognize excellence in teaching Classics and Classical Languages. Nominees should exemplify those qualities which Charles himself brought to teaching and the profession, namely a “sparkling enthusiasm for scholarship, education, and the Humanities,” which lead to innovative teaching practices (in the classroom or delivered through other means), including interdisciplinary instruction and authentic, real-life learning opportunities for all students. Furthermore, the nominee should show evidence of how he/she has influenced our profession by sharing and disseminating innovative practices for other teachers." I'm honored to receive this award in light of the Roman Road Project especially!

I hope to see many friends there for some professional development and ENvelopment!

Myth Makers - The Penelope Project

Next school year, I'll be taking a break from teaching Roman Technology to teach Myth Makers, my STEAM class based on classical mythology. (You can watch a presentation about this class here.) One of my favorite lessons to teach is weaving, in conjunction with the stories about Athena, the Greek goddess of household craft. Students consistently cite this lesson as one of their favorites. Each student creates their own hand-held loom out of cardboard and weaves a small piece of cloth. Why not take it to the next level?!

I'm spending my last day of school writing a grant to make large, ancient-style warp-weighted looms. The Penelope Project is a collaborative project that will have students build 8-foot-high looms to weave on in outdoor classrooms. While a couple of students weave, the rest of us can enjoy listening to mythological stories while we sit outside, basking in the sunshine. The looms will eventually be broken down and moved to our new school whenever it gets built.

You can read more about the project here.

And if you need free weaving lessons for your classics students, go here.

Roman Technology - Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary to my Roman Technology class! Six years in, and I'm still in love. Here's the story.

Six years ago, my former school was encouraging its teachers to incorporate STEM into their classes with the help of a STEM coordinator. If requested, Betsy Minton would help any teacher come up with a plan to integrate STEM methodology into our curriculum. As a language teacher, I found the idea intriguing. Despite the fact that I loved teaching Latin, if I'm being honest, I had grown bored with teaching language. Caesar was one of the Advanced Placement Latin exam authors I was teaching that year, and every time I read about his soldiers building a bridge across a river in record time, I pined to create a lesson in which students would actually try something like that. I used to show my Latin students episodes of a Nova series called Secrets of Lost Empires. These featured archaeologists, engineers, and historians employing experimental archaeology to recreate a Roman bath or the canvas awning of the Colosseum using the tools and processes of the ancient Romans. I decided it was time to try something different.

With Betsy's encouragement, I designed a class called Roman Technology. In its first iteration, I made it an upper level Latin course for students looking for an alternative to taking AP Latin. I had five high school seniors that were willing to try ANYTHING. One of my favorite lessons was reading and comparing the concrete recipes of Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder in the original Latin, and then actually mixing, setting, and testing our very own version of the stuff. After that first lesson, I was hooked, and I was never going back. You can read an article about that original iteration of the class here.



Mike Tyson once said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." During the first year of my Roman Technology class, I took a right hook. Midway through the year, the headmaster of my school decided that the large and popular Latin program I had worked to grow would be phased out. Although I never got a real reason from him, I think it had to do with the difficulty of scheduling students into three different languages at such a small school. He offered me a job as the school's educational technology coordinator teaching other teachers how to use things like Google Docs and Canvas. I said no. After 24 years at that small, private school, I left for a job at a local large, public middle school, Glasgow Middle, my current school. And it's been a GLORIOUS time with AMAZING students, diverse in culture, age, background, and abilities.

My new job was supposed to be part-time. The school hadn't had an in-person Latin teacher in a few years so their program was dying out. To make it a full-time position, my principal asked me to teach mythology and adapt the Roman Technology class for non-Latin students. The rest is kind of history at this point. We've built sundials, archery bows, catapults, kilns, looms, roads, gromas, and ovens, mixed makeup, bread dough, and concrete, designed ships, shadufs, aqueducts, and dice towers. And more. I can't even remember the whole list any more. 

I've presented on lessons from this class at so many conferences now that I've lost count. Countless people ask me when I'm going to write a book about it! (I wish I had an offer and the time.) In just the past year, I've had nearly a dozen people ask about how to introduce a STEM-based classics program in their own schools. If they take my advice, Roman Technology classes will be offered from California to Maine in just a couple of years.

I'm having an absolute blast designing and teaching these lessons...and sharing them with the world. I hope you've gotten some enjoyment out of them. Happy Anniversary, Roman Technology class - I love you! Here's to many more years of hands-on history learning!!

Check out my Website for Roman Technology lessons and much more.

The Roman Road Project - Paving the Way

If you're anything like me, when I'm working on a project, I'm so into the research, that I can quote numerous authors down to the paragraph and page number. But after the project is over, I tend to forget details. This blog post is an attempt to document what I did to prepare for the Roman Road Project, not only as a means of sharing with others that want to do similar work but also for my own benefit. I'm including experts I reached out to, texts I read, articles I found, and books I bought or borrowed. I hope it helps you "pave the way" to your own Roman road project.

People:

Dr. Eric Poehler is a classics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Having read his Traffic Systems of Pompeii, I emailed him for general information on Roman roads. He kindly sent me several of his articles, including my favorite one on the Romans' use of molten iron to repair streets. And by the way, if you're ever hesitating to reach out to a perfect stranger in the professional world, don't! Every expert I've ever contacted has been utterly thrilled to have someone ask about their work. Dr. Poehler was especially delighted that we were using his work in an ancient road project.

Dr. Tyson Rupnow, P.E., Ph.D., is the associate director of research at the Louisiana Transportation Research Center (the research arm of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development) and an adjunct professor in construction management at Louisiana State University. Reaching out to him early was the best decision I made for this project. Tyson became our guide and civil engineering expert for the project. I learned an incredible amount of information from him as did my students. He taught the students famous engineering expressions like "We aren't buildin' a watch!" But please don't call this man - find your own local DOD or DOTD person in your state or area. They will have more specialized knowledge about YOUR specific location. All of these departments have education outreach programs too.

Dr. Courtney Roby is a classics professor at Cornell University. I met her when we presented on a STEM in Classics panel at CANE's annual conference. She talked about how she taught her students to use a groma in a surveying exercise, and I was hooked reading her work. Without her expert advice and generosity of time, I would not have seen some crucial texts about Roman surveying tools.

Books:

Jean-Pierre Adam's Roman Building: Materials and Techniques, 1994. I bought this one late in the game, and when it arrived, I wished immediately that I had gotten it sooner. The pictures and diagrams in this book are unmatched! I still haven't had a chance to read it completely, but I'm confident that I'll develop many future Roman Technology class lessons from the information in this book.

Hugh Davies' Roman Roads in Britain, 2008. More so about the legacy of Roman roads and their influence of modern roadways, this book was a nice read.

O. A. W. Dilke's The Roman Land Surveyors: an Introduction to the Agrimensores, 1971. Shoulda bought it, may still (stay tuned LOL) even though it's $90. He writes so clearly, and his conversion table of Roman measurement - chef's kiss! Thanks to Courtney Roby for introducing me to this work.

M. J. T. Lewis' Surveying Instruments of Greece and Rome, 2001. At first, I tried to get by with borrowing this book from the library, but I ended up just buying it because his explanations of groma surveying and road construction were so specific and helpful. Even better was his list of classical sources for all the instruments he discussed - I can't stress this enough! I like to show kids the literary evidence for all the technology we discuss, and sometimes, that's hard to find. So, this source list was a dream come true.

John Peter Oleson's (editor) The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, 2008. I use this text as my go-to for anything STEM related in classics, but the article on roads quoted Vitruvius (see Poehler below) and was not focused on the building process.

John Peter Oleson's (editor and author) Building for Eternity: The History and Technology of Roman Concrete Engineering in the Sea, 2014. I've been drooling over this book for a while, and I finally bought it...only to give it as a thank-you gift to Tyson. I liked reading about how the team used concrete core samples to identify the sources of volcanic ash. The process reminded me of how LaDOTD tests asphalt and cement cores in their lab. One day...maybe I'll have my own copy. It's a very niche book from which I doubt I'll develop lessons, but some books are just good foundations for knowledge. There's always a kid asking some crazy question about Roman concrete.

Eric Poehler's The Traffic Systems of Pompeii, 2017. On page 12, he clears up issues with Vitruvius' supposed explanation of how Roman roads were built: the ancient architect wasn't describing a road, but a building foundation. This point was critical for me because nearly every article I read about the building of Roman roads referenced it as fact. In addition, I enjoyed reading Poehler's work on digital cataloging and data analysis in archaeology. His team has made some interesting discoveries using these techniques including the fact that Romans drove on the right side of the road.

Articles:

Hugh McCague's "Learning from the Roman Land Surveyors: A Mathematical Field Exercise," in Hands-on History: A Resource for Teaching Mathematics (editor, Amy Shell Gellasch), 2007. The author explains how to construct and use Roman surveying equipment, a groma (ancient transit) and decempeda (measuring rod), to lay out the two main roads of a Roman town. Very precise instructions and great exercise if you have a small class. Otherwise, you'll have to divide into smaller teams and lay out different towns. I didn't use this lesson, but I plan to in the future.

Poehler, Van Roggen, and Crowther's "The Iron Streets of Pompeii" (2019) in the American Journal of Archaeology gave us ideas on how to repair busted streets. The Romans used molten iron. We decided that might be too dangerous with 11-year-olds so we approximated - metal-colored resin. Here's a synopsis of the article.

I wish there were an article about the remains of a groma found in the shop of the blacksmith in Pompeii. Courtney Roby sent me this link to a picture of it. Also of interest are two gravestones featuring the surveying equipment: the one in Boscoreale and the one in Bologna.

Videos:

Fantastic video on how the Romans built straight roads in ancient Britain using a groma. It's a snippet of a longer series uploaded to YouTube by a fan so I've been unable to locate it the name of the series. If you know, please email me!

A Roman surveyor re-enactor shows in this video how they set up a military camp with a groma. He demonstrates perfectly the use of an oil pot to dampen the swing of the plum bob caused by the wind.

Rami Tamimi is a civil engineer with a fantastic YouTube channel all about how to survey land using modern tools. His pacing tutorials - perfection!! One of our first lessons on the Roman Road Project was pacing, and he offered great suggestions on the basics of this process.

Vitruvius' hodometer is bound to come up when talking about measuring distance. His description is in De Architectura, IX, and this video of Da Vinci's version was helpful for students to visualize how the device worked.

Archaeologist Darius Arya recently completed a YouTube video series on the Via Appia - helpful for background knowledge about this particular Roman road.

Websites:

Whenever I'm searching for images of Roman soldiers doing just about anything, I look to Trajan's column. Dr. Roger Ulrich's Website, Trajan's Column in Rome is a comprehensive collection of high-resolution images of the monument as well as research on it. I found great images of road-building here.

Orbis: the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World offered my students some fun imagining travel through the Roman world. I incorporated this fantastic tool into a lesson about milestones.

We really wanted our road to have milestones, but for a variety of reasons, it didn't happen. However, I sure loved learning about the Tabula Peutingeriana - I didn't know that its original version was dated to the first century BCE due to the inclusion of Pompeii on the map. I also introduced the students to the Forma Urbis - can I just mention how awesome this thing was?! And this Website by the Stanford folks was super helpful. In all this searching about how the Romans mapped their world, I was hoping to find a comprehensive list of milestones from the Roman world, but I found no such thing. Many in the British countryside have been repurposed as stones in later-built castles.

I'm sure there's more that I've already forgotten. Putting together a huge project like this is time-consuming but fun. I hope this little bit of background saves someone (and me) some time later on. Maybe I "paved the way" for someone!

The Roman Road Project - Front Page Story!

Yesterday, I attended a lecture at Tulane University about Roman army re-enacting by Dr. Jonathan Zarecki. Focused on the lorica segmentata that visually marked soldiers as Roman, his talk detailed how his experience as a re-enactor gave him insight into the daily life of ancient soldiers. When I raised my hand to ask a question, I introduced myself as an instructor who teaches a class called Roman Technology in Baton Rouge, LA. He interrupted my question to ask if we "were the ones who built the Roman road."  LOL In addition, three more people approached me at the lecture reception to ask about the Roman Road Project. We're famous, y'all!!

On Monday of this past week, we showed up on the FRONT PAGE of the Baton Rouge Advocate! Huzzah!!!

Here's the online article that has live links to blog posts.

Here's a link to a PDF version of the article as it appears in this picture.
















Back to the excellent lecture...Dr. Zarecki went into great detail about the Roman army cuirass - the body armor worn by nearly every Roman soldier (pictured here on Trajan's Column in Rome).

He stated that most re-enactors don't make their own because metalworking is difficult and expensive. As I looked at pictures of it with its segmented pieces, I realized that it could easily be made with cardboard in the style of Raphael Urbain's Epic Cardboard Props. (If you haven't heard of Raphael, I urge you to run over to his YouTube Channel to check out his masks and other props.) It's hard to believe they are made of cardboard!

After my own experience making a Demogorgon mask out of cardboard this past Halloween, I think this armor would be pretty simple. New Roman Technology challenge loading...the students will LOVE this!!

Me wearing the Demogorgon mask I made from cardboard. (Stranger Things: Season 1)

Roman Technology - All STEM Leads to Rome 2

A few years ago before Covid, my #RomanTechnology students got accepted to present as makers at the local Mini Maker Faire. These faires celebrate creativity in making cool stuff - mini-crochet characters, homemade robots, weaving, homemade pickles, etc. We thought others would enjoy learning how to make concrete, and wow, DID they! We guided nearly 500 visitors in making tiny cups of ancient Roman concrete (labeled with an advertisement, "Study Roman Technology at Glasgow Middle School!") My students had a blast teaching others what they had learned in class, and we realized that we were offering "classics outreach," or promoting classical studies to the general public.

When the Louisiana Department of Education named me its 2021 State Teacher of the Year and I couldn't offer in-person events due to the Covid shutdowns, I dreamed up an online event called "All STEM Leads to Rome." Over 200 kids from all over the world (some in England and Romania) signed up to participate in a Roman Technology workshop with me. I got funding from the American Classical League to mail them tiny kits so they could make along with me. Excellence Through Classics, a committee of the ACL, partnered with me to assist with an online presentation platform, and we built tiny catapults, made a game, and wrote with squid ink on papyrus. The kids had a great time and asked me when the next one was going to happen.

Soon after, I developed a wonderful relationship with the Louisiana Art and Science Museum. For many years, I had taken my students on field trips here to view their Ptolemaic Egyptian Gallery which contains Roman artifacts. The education director invited me to host a classical STEM event in their huge lobby on one of their "Free First Sundays." I immediately reached out to the Classical Association of the Middle West and South to acquire outreach funding. CAMWS's outreach funding committee quickly approved my request (as they always do because they are set up to be nimble and so helpful), and I got busy planning our first "All STEM Leads to Rome: Classics Day at the Museum." 

Nearly 50 students from my school, Glasgow Middle, and another local school, Baton Rouge Magnet High School, volunteered to run the stations. It was a joy to work with one high school student in particular, Marwan Mikdadi, whose passion for outreach and STEM is unmatched. With the pandemic still a force to be reckoned with, we didn't know what to expect, but when the doors to the museum opened, we were flooded with visitors. All told we ended up with 701 participants! The museum immediately asked us if we would repeat the event the following year.

Flash forward to this past spring, and we are now in the books with "All STEM Leads to Rome 2: Classical Chemistry and Engineering." We were sponsored by BASF, the international chemical company with a local plant in our city of Baton Rouge. Frequent sponsors of free Sundays and chemistry workshops for kids at the museum, they paid for the free admission for the "Free First Sunday" event (about $6000), and the Society for Classical Studies, another classics organization, paid for our activity supplies and t-shirts ($1000) with an Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities grant. With a nod to our sponsor, we focused on chemistry and engineering from the classical world.

Here's a breakdown of what we did:

Greeting Station We had friendly students dressed up in Roman tunics and togas to welcome visitors and tell them how the event was set up. Each visitor received a "passport" with an explanation of each station to keep them on track. Those who returned the passport completely stamped were entered in a drawing to win a pyramid block building set.

In addition the the passport, visitors also received a small bag labeled with our Roman Technology logo to put collected items into.

Station 1: Mini Scorpions Visitors built this tiny scorpion out of large popsicle sticks, tape, and rubber bands. Then, they tried out their catapult model by firing cotton swabs at a small tower of cups.

Station 2: Arches Student leaders guided visitors in building a Roman arch with this building kit. We had taped off the floor in large squares so that block kits stayed in each square and didn't wander off to random spots on the floor.

Station 3: Bridges After contemplating what Julius Caesar's bridge over the Rhine may have looked like,  visitors attempted to recreate it using large popsicle sticks and rubber bands with a plastic container acting as the river. Once built, the strength of the bridges was tested by placing a 5-pount weight on it. You can see the anticipation in this young builder's eyes as her bridge is tested!

These next two stations focused on chemistry as a thanks to our sponsor, BASF.

Station 4: Concrete My students had just studied concrete in the context of their #RomanRoadProject so they were raring to teach this lesson to visitors. Each participant had to wear eye goggles to handle the lime mortar which added to the mystique of this station. Visitors were so excited to take home their very own container of Roman concrete.

Station 5: Oak Gall Ink Visitors learned how this ink was made from the tannin of oak galls made by tiny wasps, and then tried out writing ancient Roman cursive with that ink and a simple stylus on papryus paper. Last year, we used squid ink which was much smellier, but oak gall ink has its own iron scent too.

As I wander around during the event, I'm constantly stopped by adults who want to know who our students are and where their kids can go to learn this content. One of the best things about this event is that I do nothing during it except take pictures. Students handle all visitor questions and work with young children and adults to complete the activities.

This year, my students and I partnered with the Junior Classical League from the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts in Natchitoches, LA. After a brief online training with me getting them ready for the event, their wonderful Latin teacher, Dr. Morris Tichenor, drove them to the museum to spend the afternoon with us. They had clearly soaked up much of his knowledge of epigraphy. They were thrilled to be with us, and I hope this partnership lasts! In addition, we had a few stellar students from St. Joseph's Academy in Baton Rouge - they had assisted us with the #RomanRoadProject and were excited to join us.

Overall, we ended the day with almost 675 visitors, but to be fair, we were competing against the National Women's College Basketball Championship game. Baton Rouge's own LSU Tigers were competing so we think most people were understandably watching the game. Partnering with this local museum, allowing students to take the lead, has made for a wonderful annual classics in STEM outreach event. The museum has already asked us for All STEM Leads to Rome 3 for next spring, and we plan to be there!