University Students Promoting Science in the Community

When two university science students 1 walk into the Boys and Girls Club in a small Midwestern city one afternoon, they represent a world distant from that of the young children who come running off the basketball court to ask: “What are we doing in Science Club today?” This day, their second visit, the students encounter a few familiar faces, but most of the 6-to-9 year olds are new to them. They are going to teach the children how to make kites, but first they talk about how airplanes fly. They draw an airplane wing on the white board and introduce the name Bernoulli. To forestall fidgeting, the young woman, who is studying biochemistry at the university, asks the children to say in unison “Ber-noul-li.” She tells her partner, a history major with a minor in chemistry, to demonstrate the Bernoulli principle, by blowing across a penny to lift it into a beaker lying on its side. The children follow suit, blowing pennies into a paper cup. Then they all get down to the entertaining business of making kites. Upstairs, two undergraduates in chemistry and biochemistry are drawing children into the Computer Club. When a second announcement fails to attract a quorum, the Boys and Girls Club’s supervisor wanders down to the ping pong tables to hustle up more participants. Last week the students let the children explore on the Web, finding Web sites that interest them, but this week they plan to do some “typing.” They want the children to learn a few basic things about word processing. The students express doubts that tiny Taneka, a first grader, can “type” and the supervisor agrees, but he thinks that 8-year-old Tony is up to it. Taneka is given an errand to do. The students ask the remaining nine-to-thirteen year olds to write something about themselves. As the children struggle to think what to say, the two young men circulate around the lab, offering suggestions---“Do you like pizza? Then write that,”---pointing out the shift key and punctuation when needed. Though it is 4:00, it looks and feels like school in this computer lab. 2 Project SEARCH (Science Education and Research for Children) has brought these undergraduate students here today. It is an outreach program designed to bring the science resources of a large research university to classrooms and community centers. For the past 9 years, SEARCH students have spent 4 hours each week doing hands-on-science experiments, dissecting frogs, demonstrating microscopes, lecturing about the planets, playing computer games, exploring the World Wide Web, and creating Web pages.