Laura Overdeck was looking on with a huge smile as Jeff Williamson sat on the floor with his kindergarten class at Ivy Hill Elementary in Newark, teaching his young students how to count using old crayons.

The lesson was part of a program from Bedtime Math, a nonprofit that Overdeck founded and runs in Summit with the goal of making math more accessible to kids by positioning it to be a part of the family routine.

“Bedtime Math is about making math playful for kids,” she said. “It’s really a signal to kids that they might really want to do math on purpose. That’s not really how our culture looks at math at all. We read for pleasure, so we’re trying to have math for pleasure.”

And while the organization originally started with a blog on which Overdeck would post daily math problems for parents to do with their children at night, its programs have made their way into schools across the country.

Because of it, Bedtime Math has 250,000 people who are now engaged on some level, using either its app or its website.

Overdeck, who has a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Princeton University and an MBA in public policy from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, sees that number as a sign of considerable growth since the program started in 2012.

She knows, however, there is a big opportunity for more growth.

“A quarter of a million is great, but I’m always reminded that there are 25 million kids in our target market, so that’s 1 percent, literally,” she said. “So, even though we want to work outside the classroom, we know that schools are the best way to reach kids or parents who might not know we’re out there or don’t have the wherewithal to take on another parenting to-do.”

Overdeck aims to show math can be found anywhere and everywhere. As it was on this day in Newark.

On the second floor of Ivy Hill, Jamie Summers was using crayons to illustrate another mathematical concept for her second grade class: the difference between odd and even numbers.

It was a game called “The Odd Couple,” where students who collected odd sums of crayons were kept in the game through the next round until, ultimately, a winner was decided.

“Our original game had the students collecting the crayons, counting them and then adding different numbers together,” Overdeck said. “If you add two even numbers or two odd numbers together, your sum will be even; but, if you add an odd and an even number, the sum will be odd.”

That original concept was ahead of the second-grade curriculum, so Summers had simplified the game by having her students organize their crayons into clusters of five or 10 and adding those to determine if they had grabbed an odd or even amount.

Overdeck was fine with the change in the exercise. In fact, she was thrilled to see it.

“We give the teachers freedom to customize the activity,” she said. “It’s interesting to see how each teacher changes it just a little bit to fit their classroom.”

Overdeck, after all, always is looking to change up her programs. The lessons with crayons are a prime example.

“We came up with this initiative for the crayons because I’d initially heard about a guy in California (Bryan Ware) who collects crayons from the big restaurant chains, melts them to make clean, new crayons and donates them to children’s hospitals,” she said. “It struck us that, here in New Jersey, a lot of people throw out a lot of school supplies because they buy fresh stuff in September.”

So, Bedtime Math held a statewide crayon drive during the week of June 6 to raise materials that will be given to Bryan Ware’s Crayon Initiative. The students get to learn math through fun games as they collect and sort the crayons by color.

“We have over 100 elementary schools throughout New Jersey who are participating,” Overdeck said. “It covers more than 30,000 kids who have the opportunity to bring in extra crayons.”

And to keep a sense of fun and incentive, there’s a contest that rewards the schools that collect the most crayons.

“The Top 10 collecting schools will get a prize, which is a choice of a 3-D printer, a drone or a telescope,” she said.

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