All-Star Future Goals Kids Day provides fun chance to learn at beach

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Cynthia Hamby was surrounded by happy students on the beach Thursday.

"They're just having a blast," the fifth-grade teacher from Davie Elementary School in Davie, Florida, said at the 2023 NHL All-Star Future Goals Kids Day presented by SAP at Fort Lauderdale Park. "It's just a great time for the kids to get out and actually learn something educational, but still have a great time doing it."
The kids event, as well as the 2023 Truly Hard Seltzer NHL All-Star Beach Festival, which began at noon Thursday at the park, are part of the festivities heading into the 2023 Honda NHL All-Star Game at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise on Saturday (3 p.m. ET; ABC, CBC, SN, TVAS, ESPN+).
RELATED: [2023 NHL All-Star Game coverage]
Hundreds of students participated in Kids Day, during which they were treated to a mascot dance party before listening to a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and Sustainability panel. Florida Panthers radio play-by-play voice Doug Plagens led the panel, which included NHL Director of Social Impact, Growth and Fan Development Andrew Ference; Florida Panthers chief revenue officer Shawn Thornton; and Dan Fleetwood, SAP Vice President of Global Sponsorships.
Ference and Thornton won the Stanley Cup as teammates with the Boston Bruins in 2011.
Future Goals - Hockey Scholar is an online course that teaches STEM concepts through the prism of hockey.
"[It's] being able to talk about this with the students here in the community and show what we're doing to help support their communities to help them learn," Fleetwood said.
"And how you can take something like the sport of hockey and apply science, math and data and all these other great things that will give you skills in life that, if by chance you don't make it to the League, you can still be involved with the sport, you can go be involved in this world through the use of data analytics."

Thornton told the students how the Panthers use math in various ways.
"On ticket sales, we're looking at where people are buying tickets, what the price point is, how many tickets they're buying, and we use that math to see how much we can charge next year. On the partnership side, we take what assets we have, we see what the value is to them, present them to partners such as SAP, then we want to make sure we're measuring the objectives they have with those assets."
Students then participated in a scavenger hunt and tried their hand at some of the hockey skill areas, including the Great Clips Target Practice and the Guaranteed Rate Accuracy Challenge. They also were able to take pictures with several mascots; Gritty of the Philadelphia Flyers and Youppi! of the Montreal Canadiens attracted some of the biggest crowds.
"It's special," said Bija Johnson, a fourth-grade teacher at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale. "We're outside and we're getting sunshine, which is unusual. We're usually in a room with four walls, and because we're a Title I school we work from bell to bell. So I think this is something really special."

When the festival opened to the general public, some of those first through the gates ran directly to Autograph Cove to get Florida Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk's signature. Vivian Lopez of Miami was beaming after getting Tkachuk's autograph on her Panthers jersey.
"We're big Panthers fans. We're always at the games, we love Matthew Tkachuk and obviously 'Barky,'" Lopez said of Panthers forward Aleksander Barkov. "It's super cool. The beach, the scenery, we're not in the building. We love it."

Joe Cutroni, who lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, has been to a few All-Star Game outdoor events, but nothing quite like this.
"I went to one in Manhattan back in 1994, one in Tampa in 1999, Nashville. They're all set up a little differently," said Cutroni, who was born and raised in New York and was wearing a New York Rangers shirt. "Last year's in [Las] Vegas must've been pretty cool on The Strip, but I mean, middle of February, getting to come down here to 85-degree weather, you're not going to beat that."