Recently, AIG students at Hurley Elementary had a chance to pit their wits against real world scientists.

In a collaboration with Cardinal Innovations Healthcare, Paul Drucker’s fifth grade class participated in a game of “are you smarter than a fifth grader” against data analysts from Cardinal.

The game was filmed and will serve as a training opportunity for Cardinal’s Data Analytics department, Erin Drucker, a data science analyst with Cardinal, said. She’s married to Paul Drucker, the teacher whose class ran the show. Paul made the suggestion of using the class to help illustrate basic data concepts while the two were brainstorming, and Erin jumped on board.

“It’s a cool way to connect what’s going on in the world with the class,” she said.

And it was a way to make learning fun, for the analysts at Cardinal and for the kids. The training video was filmed a few weeks ago, but Monday the data analysis team and Drucker’s class gathered in the media center at Hurley to watch the finished product.

Every child in Drucker’s class had a part in the video, whether they served as an announcer, a host, a held the card with questions, or competed on one of the three math teams. Questions were posed that illustrated simple, but vital, math concepts—mean, median, mode, dividing with remainders, probability and simple word problems. If the fifth graders solved the question correctly, they were asked to illustrate how they arrived at their answer on a board.

“It was a good way to get the kids involved and think outside the box,” Erin said.

Paul says that he often uses a game show format to teach, and the event met Rowan-Salisbury’s CCRP model for learning. He said the class was eager to be a part of the video.

“The excitement was very high,” he said.

Monday, the kids gathered on the floor of the media center to watch their star performance. They were joined by Brittany Zemanick’s fifth grade class, who played the audience in the video. The kids munched on popcorn and candy canes, laughing at jokes from the host and pointing themselves out on screen. When the fifth graders won, they cheered.

“It was a good opportunity to not only do the training with the video but also collaborate with the counties we serve,” Cardinal’s Director of Data Science and Business Analytics Brent Matthewson said.

“Are the Cardinals smarter than the fifth graders” will roll out at Cardinal Innovations Data Analytics department in 2016.