PORTSMOUTH — Fiona Dooley wanted kids to get as excited about math as she is.

So for her senior project at Portsmouth High School, she decided to make that happen. She taught a six-week after-school class for gifted and talented fourth-graders at Hathaway School, which ended Monday.

“I taught an extracurricular math program for the fourth-graders who really wanted a challenge in math,” Fiona said during a short break in her lesson Monday. “Hathaway used to have a challenge math program and I felt the school was missing that; they don’t have that anymore. I wanted to do this to get those kids excited about math and get really into it for the rest of their lives.”

Fiona, whose mentor was a previous teacher of hers at Hathaway — Cindy Kneller is still there, in fact — asked for recommendations from teachers on students who would be good matches for the program.

“I got 19 recommendations and I had only 10 spots in the class, so we took the first 10 who put in their forms. The kids were really excited about doing it and I was really excited to teach it,” she said.

Her program was called “Math in the Real World.”

“I did some math concepts along with the invention process to teach them how to relate math to the real world, and engineering and things like that,” Fiona said. “I taught them about box dimensions and from that we created compartment lunchboxes. They were learning how to build from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and how to split them up into fractions as well. They were taught how to relate the concepts to the invention process.”

One of her students, Emma Gervelis, said she liked how she was learning math through hands-on, creative activities in class,

“In class we had this thing called the invention process, where we had to make an advertisement and a lunchbox with graph paper,” Emma said. “You had to make different compartments with the length and widths and stuff, and I liked it because you actually got to design what you were thinking of.”

Fiona said her students had homework every night. “They’ve done a really job of keeping up with everything I’ve assigned,” she said.

One of her inspirations for the class, she said, was the “Invention Convention” held at Portsmouth Middle School, which got her interested in science fairs and later, engineering.

Fiona said teaching is not in her future.

“Actually, I want to go into mechanical engineering, and I really want to get kids excited about that because sometimes if they’re bored in math class because they’re so advanced, then they end up being uncertain and uninterested in it. I want to keep them interested in class.”