from the searching-for-the-next-generation-of-scientists dept.
Graduate student volunteers and staff from the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA recently showed more than 300 high school students from Bell Gardens High School that there's a fun side to science at "Ask a Scientist," an event that the high school hosts annually.
High school students flocked to the school auditorium to participate in hands-on demonstrations and pose questions about science, nanotechnology, research and available opportunities for internships and programs.
The school partnered with CNSI to bring concepts of nanotechnology and science to students from this underserved, predominantly Latino community who typically do not have access to science or scientists outside the classroom, said high school officials. "This event is special because it allows our students to see what's out there in the science world," said Juan Herrera, school principal. "These types of opportunities give our students the background, the knowledge, and the motivation to want to become scientists."
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @10:52PM
I want my kids up close with Rush Limbaugh and alt-right ditto-heads. That's real learnin'.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @11:24PM
CNSI Scientists Targeted By High School Sex Sting
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 02 2017, @12:53AM
I'm happy to commend the grad students and staff that made this possible. But as someone who actually taught high school science for a few years, I wish more teachers would make science "fun" on a daily basis.
I had one high school chemistry teacher who did so. He had actually worked as a chemist in the field, and he did a great job until he was apparently fired. (I never got the whole story, but I believe it had something to do with lab safety protocols around students -- he let us do stuff he probably shouldn't have... but it was fun and we actually learned a LOT.) My biology and physics teachers, etc. were pretty terrible and boring as heck.
Science is naturally an exploratory field, but the closest most high school kids generally get to "doing science" is some canned lab routine where you follow some boring procedure step-by-step, take down data in a pre-made format, then do some calculations (often on a given worksheet), and then answer some boring questions. I myself assigned such labs the first year I taught physics... it was frankly the only way I could see at that time to organize things when I had roughly 150 students to supervise (6 sections with ~25 students each).
My last year teaching high school, I was teaching at a private high school where I was lucky enough to have only 4 sections with an average of 13 students, which made all the difference in the world. I was also lucky enough to have two experienced physics colleagues who were used to making very creative activities for kids. So we designed a lot of somewhat open-ended exploratory labs which frequently required students to figure out a procedure (with some prompting), figure out how to collect data efficiently and effectively (within some vague guidelines), all in the service of answering some very broad questions... which ultimately led them to learn about how some physical phenomena or systems worked. I'd wander around the room and prompt each group when necessary to help them along, and we'd all meet together as a large class group for 5 minutes at the beginning or end of class to go over some goals and clarify steps when we were all close to "on the same page."
Most of the students seemed to really love it, because they'd actually DISCOVER stuff themselves. They'd have this basic lab setup, and after trying out 4 or 5 different ways to collect and look at the data, suddenly they'd graph it and -- "Woah, there's this cool curve!" I'd ask, "Does it look familiar?" And one of them would say, "Huh, yeah, it's like a piece of a parabola... we just have been doing that stuff in math class."
From my perspective, I think a lot of kids would be a lot more interested in science if they actually tried to DO it, rather than just memorizing facts, solving equations, and have the occasional canned lab procedure where everything is predetermined and there's no place for creative thought. Unfortunately, doing creative activities in class often requires a lot of planning by teachers (since the more "free-form" and exploratory the activities, the more prep you generally have to do to make sure it ultimately comes together and works well at the end). It's a lot easier to just assign problems out of a textbook or hand out a worksheet or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @01:33AM
Mushroom grow kits and hands-on sex ed in biology class.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @02:26AM
Make sure the boys are circumcised nice and tight so they can't pass on any of their diseases to a woman.