by Casey Meehan, GHB Individual Market Specialist

April is national “Math Awareness Month.” To engage students and community in ways that math is used in real-life settings, the Thurston County Chamber Education Committee has partnered with local businesses for the last 8 years for the popular “Math for Life” program for K-12 students.

Students from Griffin, Olympia, North Thurston, Tumwater and Yelm school districts were invited to participate by visiting local businesses to chat with staff members and run through real-life applications of how math is used at the respective participating organizations. This year, “Math for Life” ran from March 24 – April 8, 2018.

This was the first year GHB participated in the program. Over the two weeks, about 75 kids came into our business to learn about how math works in the insurance world, specifically at our office.

We shared many laughs as we worked through our auto insurance scenario, simplifying how premiums, potential claims and risk pools are all factored into our client’s decision process as they go about choosing a product that best fits their needs.

We were able to create a scalable (according to grade/skill level) problem in which the students were to calculate how much money an insurance company made based on randomly assigned premiums and with the roll of the dice, an auto accident, resulting in a claim!

We’d like to give a special thanks to the Thurston County Chamber of Commerce for putting together such a valuable program. In addition, we’d like to thank our partners at Progressive and Safeco for providing us with an array of goodies that we were able to hand out to our Math-for-Life students.

Casey Meehan is an individual insurance market specialist with GHB and coordinated GHB’s participation in Math for Life this year.