Catalyst

Sharing the Beauty of Science

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By Mary Beckman

Even though Richard Steiner knew that physics dictated that he wouldn't get burned, it still took him 15 years to work up the courage to gargle liquid nitrogen -- a gas so cold he can dip hot dogs into it and shatter them on the floor like crystals.

Now, he gargles the super-cold elixir once a year, being careful to maintain a cushion of air between his tender skin and the fluid. The Girl Scouts assembled around him are surprised and bemused that anyone would try such a thing. Their parents look on, thinking this shouldn't be tried at home.

Most days Steiner heads a team of physicists and engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., where they're trying to turn a one-kilogram mass of metal into an electrical measurement. But once a year, he spends a day teaching Girl Scouts about science with hands-on experiments. And over the winter, he participates in a program called Adventures in Science that holds Saturday workshops for area elementary and high-school students on topics like kitchen chemistry and how guitars work.

For a senior scientist, he says, "one of the nice things about teaching kids in this setting is you can do something a little bit different."

Extracurricular Rewards

Research scientists are informally sharing their expertise with school-age children across the country. The physicist and Nobel laureate Leon Lederman has long worked to improve elementary and high-school science education, even as he directed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and worked as a professor of physics at the University of Chicago.

In his view, scientists and engineers at all stages of their careers should do some educational outreach. "I think scientists should get involved, given how important [science] is to our economic and cultural future," he says. "We should take it seriously because it's the next generation."

Eric Loewen, a nuclear engineer at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, brings nuclear physics and math -- sometimes while wearing a wedding dress to emphasize, for example, how math is married to everyday music and art -- to elementary schools in southeast Idaho. "Most of my technical education has been paid for by taxpayers," he says. "My goal is to give a little bit back. My payment? When kids send me a thank-you note. That's how I know I've reached them."

Of course, if concern for America's future and giving something back aren't good enough reasons to go out into the sea of children, Steiner says scientists should go because "it's fun. I have as much fun showing the kids fancy stuff as they have watching it."

"Hands-On"

"The buzz-word is 'hands-on,'" Lederman says, explaining that schoolchildren can learn the process of science without having to memorize a bunch of jargon. Students can set up experiments to determine which laundry detergent makes the strongest bubbles. With careful guidance, these prescientists can learn about experimental design, data gathering, graphing, and analysis.

"If you do it right, kids love it," says Steiner. "It's simultaneously easy and hard. Easy because it seems cool and exciting. Hard because so many people get the impression that science is terrible and boring. Younger kids, they're not so jaded."

Steiner teaches at the Adventures in Science program from October through March in the Washington, D.C., area. The voluntary program is administered by Montgomery County Public Schools. Students can select from four different workshops at several locations. "Ten years ago, computers were the most popular. Five years, it was Web design. Now, it's mouse dissection and science-fiction classes." Steiner brings in science-fiction videos to discuss how accurately Hollywood portrays science.

Humor is key to keeping the audience captivated, says Loewen. "You have to communicate technical information with anecdotal stories," he says. "People like to learn that way."

Loewen, who just received an award from the National Nuclear Society for his extracurricular teaching, designs stories around the experiments. For example, he had a fourth-grade teacher collect fingernail clippings from the students. He sent the fingernails to a colleague in the University of Wisconsin System who performed neutron activation analysis to determine which heavy metals resided in the nails.

Returning to the classroom, Loewen shared the data with the students, but also kept an unidentified nail. He then concocted a crime story -- the fingernail was found on a stolen skateboard -- and he had the students determine which of their nails matched the unknown criminal's.

Getting Started

Prompted for advice, Loewen suggests that scientists who are interested in educational outreach should join the Toastmasters International to improve their public speaking. He also recommends developing relationships with local teachers.

Starting with the younger grades is easier than jumping right into high schools, which have stricter curriculums and higher expectations, he says. But schools do look for people to come in.

For those scientists who don't particularly enjoy working with children, Lederman says there are other options. For example, some local research institutions will make arrangements for academic scientists to serve as mentors to science schoolteachers. It's not that difficult, he notes: "The scientist will meet with the teacher. The teacher will unload all her problems, and then the scientist will help her." Such interactions help teachers understand science better, and accommodate scientists who are looking for ways to help but who aren't excited about going into school classrooms themselves.

"Mostly it's getting out and doing it," says Steiner. The Adventures in Science program that he is involved with is well established, and Steiner says a lot of the scientists who teach in it start out as helpers who eventually work up the nerve to lead a workshop.

"We want to find people who are comfortable doing it," he says. "Some will lecture to the kids for an hour," an approach not well tolerated by antsy adolescents. The workshops offered by the program change from year to year and various "cookbooks" on how to do demonstrations can be found on the Web for the uninitiated.

How researchers interact with youngsters is as important as offering cool demos. "Treat the kids as intelligent," Steiner says. "They need to be encouraged to make some guesses about how things work. They can learn by guessing and finding out they were wrong. There are no dumb questions, just dumb explainers."

Other Options

Museums can also be a good way for scientists to connect with the younger crowd. Steve Johnson, an associate professor of genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, didn't even have to seek out the opportunity. He got a call from the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco that was putting together an exhibit on genetics. The museum had heard about his work with zebrafish. Zebrafish normally have horizontal stripes, but Johnson provided the museum with fish in which genetic mutations had wiped out the stripes or turned them into spots, demonstrating how mutations can affect characteristics normally taken for granted.

In Johnson's case, his behind-the-scenes role on the exhibit suited him perfectly. He didn't get to stand up in front of a bunch of sugar-infused preteens, but he did learn a few lessons about tailoring his material to a young audience. It's difficult to convey the accumulation of decades of fascinating knowledge in an exhibit. As a geneticist, he says, "what you want to do in an exhibit is nearly impossible with live fish." Still, he would do it again.

Many hands-on science museums like the Exploratorium have developed books and activities to help academics learn how to convey their work to a young audience. Additionally, educators at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley have worked out curriculums to help improve science education in elementary and high schools. The Teaching Integrated Math and Science Project (TIMS) at Illinois-Chicago focuses on numbers and nature in elementary grades. Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science offers hands-on tools to teach science to students through high school.

Scientists willing to make the effort will be welcomed and encouraged in their outreach activities. "We can't give up on teaching how science works," says Lederman. "The only thing that's universal is the science culture, and the more you know, the more beautiful it is."