The girls (and one boy) who are making math cool

"How do you take an academic topic that's sort of abstract and then make it relatable or fun or interesting?"

That's Dylan Robertson. He's the director of Math Club. As he checks the camera angles and makes sure the girls know where to stand and what direction to face, he reminds me of the old Hollywood saying about working with children and dogs, and how there's nothing more complicated.

Robertson's show is all children (thankfully for him, no dogs), plus he has to make math look interesting. It's not a cakewalk. It starts with research from his academic advisors.

"We'll look at that [research], and what was apparent to us from the beginning is, how do you translate that into plain speak?" he says.

For their multiplication video, the team made a Wes Anderson movie rip-off, merged with reality-TV flair. For negative numbers, they riffed on Mean Girls and Darth Vader. For subtraction, The Matrix. Each episode starts with an academic topic, and then Robertson and his team try to find a real-world example that kids will find interesting in order to explain it.

For the integer video, all of the academic research suggested kids would learn best from a thermometer. Hot is positive, cold is negative. Add one to the other, etc. Robertson's team threw that right out.

"We have another teacher, Helen Papadopoulos, who was California teacher of the year in 2007," he says. "The reason we got her was, we wanted somebody who had taught kids day in and day out. ... And she's like, 'Don't use the thermometer. Kids don't get it.' So we're like, 'OK, throw out the thermometer script.'"

The script they used instead is much simpler, more to the point and features the kids just being kids. The first example: YouTube. The Math Club kids use YouTube voting as an example of positive and negative numbers. A thumbs up vote is a positive number, and a thumbs down vote is a negative number. Check a video's total votes — it's a product of adding up all those positive and negative numbers. Boom — integers.

Julianna takes the lead breaking integers down even further. She tells a story about borrowing $50 from a friend to buy a jacket at the mall. Now she owes her friend $50. Meaning, she has -$50. She went from zero to negative. That's an integer.

"It turned out that [Julianna] was so natural," says Robertson. "She looked at [the integer problem] and she was like, 'I know exactly what to do.' And she made it her own. She bought her own jacket. I feel like that's what makes that scene — it's all done in one take, because it's just her speaking very plainly."

Back at the shoot, Robertson is directing Julianna and Lawlor through a scene that involves the two of them lying on the grass, staring up at the cameras and counting the text messages on their phones. In the final cut, the scene will be less than a minute of the less-than-five-minute video.

The overall pace of production is quick. The shot at the school took a couple of hours. The park will be wrapped in less than that. Then it's lunch time, and then an hour or two back at the show's main set, a garage behind a house that's been converted into a bedroom.

Julianna and Lawlor roll with it. They improvise lines, goof off between takes and, in general, try to not screw up. They're both pros, but also undeniably teenagers.

"I think I have all these different aspects of my personality," Lawlor says. "I enjoy a bunch of different things."

Lawlor grew up in South Dakota. She did track and cross-country, and was on a break from playing soccer when she dipped her toe into acting. While a freshman in high school, she persuaded her parents to let her try an acting camp in LA, then spent the summer of that year living in LA, going to auditions. She finished her sophomore year in Rapid City, then moved to LA "full-time."

"That's been my main thing ever since," she says.

After spending her Saturday shooting Math Club, she's off to do an audition for a pilot called Madame Secretary, starring Tea Leoni. (The pilot got picked up, but Lawlor didn't get the job.) The day before, she auditioned for a Disney show.

When asked why math is important, she immediately rattles off a plug for Math Club, then asks for a second chance to answer the question.

"Math is important," she says, and she means it. "It's the root of science. It's the root of architecture. It's the root of so many things. You do need to know math if you want to be an educated human being and understand how things in the world function."

Julianna, 17, is perhaps the most typical teenage actor of the group. She's been acting since age 7. She did a Hanes commercial. She was princess Azula in the Last Airbender film. ("It was really bad, but it was in theaters.") Her dream role: Mafia princess.

"Because I'm Mexican and Italian," she says. Then she asks if she looks more Mexican or more Italian. After the shoot, she will be off to an audition for a Coca-Cola commercial. It's not a callback, but it's a referral from her last callback, so she's hopeful.

Julianna is from New Jersey. Like Lawlor, she spent time in LA getting her feet wet and then decided to make the move permanent. Math Club was her big break.

"My mom was actually planning on taking me back to Jersey for a year," she says, "and I'd come back [to LA] senior year, but I didn't want to come back. Just because of the money situation. I was going to go back to Jersey. But then, when I got this job, I was like, 'Yes, I got a job, I'm not leaving anymore! Oh, yes! Everything's happening!'"

Julianna wants to keep acting and eventually direct, but Math Club is more than just a gig. Like the rest of the girls (and the only boy, Jacob, who was off on this day), she just enjoys teaching other kids.

"We're actual kids, and we can relate to other kids that are watching our videos," she says. "We help them. We act as their friend. We put math in cool scenarios. It's very different and very unique and very lifelike. It's life-changing. It really works. And we're smart, too. We know how to help you with your math!"