How To Get High-Schoolers Involved In Real Science?

Wellington Grey writes "I'm a physics teacher and have been wondering what ways it's possible to get students to participate in or donate to real science projects. I encourage my students to help out with things like Galaxy Zoo (which has just released a new version) and to get them to install BOINC on their personal computers. Do Slashdotters out there have any other suggestions that would be appropriate for the 11-18 age range? Extra credit if you can think of a way that I can track their progress so that I can give them extra credit."

Comments

Re:Gee.. How long have you been a physics teacher?

[slapout]

Nope. When I was in school, I liked science, but most kids hated doing science fair projects. I wanted to do projects that were interesting, like show how something worked. But the school imposed the rule that every project had to be based on the idea of answering some question.

Model Rocketry

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a rocketry project one year in physics and found out later that my teacher included it in his curriculum every year thereafter.

There was a program in my high school

[nine-times]

When I was in high school, there was some kind of pilot program that I participated in where we helped do actual scientific research.

Now I have no idea how they set it up or whether our work was ever actually taken seriously by anyone, since I was just a student at the time. I didn't have insight into that sort of thing. But the setup was that the teacher was put in touch with an organization that did research regarding weather patterns. We were given access to collect remote data from various weather stations, and even helped set up a few weather stations ourselves.

So at the beginning of the year, the organization and the teacher worked out some projects which involved a fair amount of grunt work and not a lot of expertise (i.e. something a group of students might have some hope of doing) but that might possibly be helpful to the organization (at least supposedly). We were given a few options of different questions we might pursue, and then started collecting data under the supervision of the teacher, who I believe was something of a meteorologist to begin with.

After a semester or year, whichever it was, we tried to pull together everything we'd done all year, analyze the data, and come up with a report to send to this organization, attempting to answer the question they asked us to research.

Looking back, I would be very surprised if our work was at all useful to anyone. In fact, I have no doubt that the report very quickly found its way into the circular file, though they may have kept some of the data we collected for their own purposes. But at the time, that really didn't matter. It was kind of thrilling anyway.

I don't think it was thrilling because of the science itself. Weather was far less interesting to me than something like relativity or quantum mechanics. What was thrilling about it was:

1. We were trying to find an actual answer to a question where no one knew the answer. This wasn't one of those experiments where they have you mix NaOH and HCl and at the end the teacher tells you that the correct answer was "you made salt water". It was something where the teacher himself couldn't say what we were going to find before we started.
2. It was (theoretically) actually useful research. We weren't just spinning our wheels doing busy work. Most of the time, me and my friends would make a bond fire at the end of each school year and throw all of our papers and homework on it because none of that stuff mattered or meant anything. But with this program, we were given the impression that the report would be stored someplace as real research that might actually be useful to someone at some point.

Re:There was a program in my high school

[Bowling Moses]

I happen to be on the other end of this. The lab I work in participates in a youth apprenticeship program with the local school district, and one of the options for the gifted and talented students that get into the program is biotechnology. For the last year and a half I've had a high school student assisting me (16 hours a week, full time in summer) on some of the research projects I'm working on (I'm a postdoctoral research associate in entomology). Through his lab work and a weekly 4 hour lab course he's learned quite a few skills. Cloning techniques, site-directed mutagenesis, how to do SDS-PAGE and acrylamide gel electrophoresis (non-bio people: put gene of interest into vector and then into bacteria, make specific mutation in gene, separate out proteins and DNA fragments by size), how to make up solutions, sterile technique, a bit of raising insects, and other basic molecular biology techniques. That and of course fill tip boxes and wash and autoclave labware, which is just as fun as it sounds. I try to keep it non-repetitive and introduce new things when he's mastered old, and his doing of more grunt work gives me time to do other things once I'm sure he's okay on his own for a given technique. Not many high school students are capable of operating at the level he's at. However the lab's been doing this for quite a few years now and all of the students leave with at least a good introduction to basic molecular biology techniques and what science is really like: if you only had to do it once it'd be search, not REsearch. I don't think they've ended up as authors on papers as of yet, but they do help keep the lab running. Some have been given mini-projects that have been of backburner project interest level, some of which now are being pursued by graduate students. So yes in the right environment high school students can make a contribution to real research.

Adam Savage's View

[Nos.]

Adam Savage (from Mythbusters), wrote an article in Popular Mechanics a few months ago talking about science the US education system.