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."

Ask Thomas Dolby

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

I think the answer has something to do with a Poser model, a government mainframe, and a freak electrical storm...

ONE "WORD"

[Jeremiah Cornelius (137)]

Pr0n

Safe science is gay

[AliasMarlowe (1042386)]

Let them use proper explosives, and let them make their own thermites, black powder or napalms. They'll develop an aptitude for chemistry (and perhaps an appreciation of medicine).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm [wikipedia.org]
Let them play with a decently-sized ballista, trebuchet, or onager. They'll learn all about dynamics and ballistics, wind resistance, action-reaction (the onager kicks a bit), and the delivery of kinetic energy via projectile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onager_(siege_weapon) [wikipedia.org]
However, if they combine the explosives with the projectiles, their neighbours will study the law.
[Yes, I had a dangerously mis-spent childhood, and turned into a chemical engineer]

Re:Safe science is gay

[nitroamos (261075)]

Perhaps ironically since now i do computation, what made the most difference in my life as far as getting me interested in science was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook [wikipedia.org]

which i could find online. i didn't care about hacking phones or whatever. but i used this to help me understand all the chemicals i could get my hands on at the local drug stores. fortunately, i couldn't hurt myself too much, since where I lived it is illegal to sell nitric acid to people without a license or something. however, i was able to get my hands on or make two highly exciting substances:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbide [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_triiodide [wikipedia.org]
sodium metal

Re:Safe science is gay

[joh6nn (554969)]

i would seriously appreciate it if you could find a different pejorative.

Ask Slashdot

[biocute (936687)]

"I'm a high school student and my physics teacher always comes up with ideas to get us to participate in or donate to real science projects. He even encourages us to help out with things like Galaxy Zoo (which has just released a new version, grrrr, dreadful updates again) and even gets us to install BOINC on our PERSONAL computers. Do Slashdotters out there have any suggestions that would be appropriate to satisfy this 35-year-old physics teacher? Extra credit if you can think of a way that I can fake my progress so that I can get extra credit."

Re:Ask Slashdot

[martin-boundary (547041)]

Dear HIGHSCHOOL STUDENT Sir/Madam,

I am Mbutu Kiko Kiko, a 35 year old physics teacher. My lab director has recently organized a coup against the theoretical physics junta, and I need your ATM MACHINE CARD to protect $8,500,000 worth of funds converted in small pens and spiral notebooks...

Slashdot says

[by Anonymous Coward]

Take pictures of space!

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/18/1645216

Ionospheric propagation

[wowbagger (69688)]

You could have them monitor HF propagation beacons [arrl.org] to track the effects of the new sunspot Solar Cycle on the ionosphere.

You could have them do balloon launches [telegraph.co.uk].

We need more

[hypergreatthing (254983)]

Kelly LeBrock.

Try successful cases

[casals (885017)]

Have you tried to show them successful stories like this one [slashdot.org]? High schoolers are more prone to do something that a) has good chances to success and b) has very good chances to make them look good. Show them enough successful projects like "hey, how cool is that, uh?", and you probably will be able to gather even the not-that-geeks.

Wait, what?

[Reality Master 101 (179095)]

You want to get students interested in "real science", then as your examples you cite some computer programs? And they learn what from this?

When I was in school, the best science was *always* some sort of physical demonstration. I still remember being in physics class where we calculated the speed that a ball ought to go down a ramp, fly through the air and hit a spot on some paper. I marked an "X", and sure enough, the ball landed on the X (within experimental error).

I also remember being fascinated at my local science museum at a big box with pegs and a bell curve painted on the glass. Every few minutes balls would fall randomly through the pegs, yet fall into the bell curve. [of course, in recent years they got rid of all the cool stuff in favor of "corporate demonstrations" that totally suck, but that's another subject]

Then there were the chemistry experiments... and field trips to the park... you get the idea.

Make science real by making it something physical that students can see/touch/smell.

Re:Wait, what?

[Reality Master 101 (179095)]

Oops, I misread his question. I thought he was asking for how to get students interested in science, when he was asking how to get students involved in *helping* science, apparently. Never mind.

Re:

[colourmyeyes (1028804)]

My physics teacher (who was awesome) did an experiment where we hung a bowling ball from the ceiling, then he sat in a chair, pulled the bowling ball back to his face, and let it go. This was to prove that as it swung, the ball lost energy and would not hit him in the nose when it swung back. We videotaped it and though the bowling ball obeyed the laws of physics and did not hit him, the look on his face was priceless.

Anyway, I think the computer-related stuff is alright, but I agree that physical stuff ha

Re:Wait, what?

[Kell Bengal (711123)]

Easy - just borrow a piece from one of the students.

Prepared May Be Better than Involved

[LeafOnTheWind (1066228)]

When I was in high school in my chem AP class, my teacher had set it up so that at the end of the year we all had to read a timely chemistry research paper that had been published in a major journal and prepare a presentation on it for the class. This may not be what you want to hear but from what I remember of my chem. AP curriculum, I was grossly underprepared to do any serious research. However, I definitely remember than dealing with both a research subject and the academic publishing style gave a lot of background for my future.

That said, I'm computer science not chemistry, so I guess I don't know how that would have turned out in the long run. Even though I'm not chem, I know that the experience in reading real research papers definitely prepared me for graduate and research coursework in college more than anything else in my time in high school.

That said, my minor is physics, so I do know a little bit about that as well. If you've done electromagnetism/electronics, I would encourage maybe giving your students an electronics project. It was nice to have a little practical lab after all that theory. An infinite field of one ohm resisters is one thing - rewiring your coffee maker with a job server is another (btw if any of your students actually manage to do this, send me an email). That said, many of your students (I was one) may really like theory and Maxwell's equations and vector calculus, so don't make the course too EE based.

Am I the only one who read the title like

[szo (7842)]

How To Get High - Schoolers Involved In Real Science?

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

[ewenix (702589)]

I know I've been out of school for a while, but I believe what you're looking for is called a SCIENCE FAIR.

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

[slapout (93640)]

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.

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

[geekoid (135745)]

That just means you didn't like the rules for that science fair.

Besides your answers the question:"hey, how does this work?"~

Great documentary

[Chairboy (88841)]

There's a great documentary on a teacher who faced the same challenges and found innovating ways to overcome them. He needed to give his students some projects that would have real-world results that could be measured. In the end, he helped a classroom of very talented kids construct some world-class devices that made breakthroughs in the areas of lasers, inertial guidance, optics, and more.

Very inspiration stuff, I highly recommend watching. Professor J. Hathaway should be commended for his innovative approach to this exact situation. More information on the documentary can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ [imdb.com]

There was a program in my high school

[nine-times (778537)]

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 (591924)]

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.

You are teaching them science is boring. Stop it!

[tlambert (566799)]

You are teaching them science is boring. Stop it!

BOINC is interesting if your machine finds the aliens, and actually told you it did.

Galaxy Zoo is for when there is no fresh paint to watch dry.

In my physics classes in high school we DID things, and then we explained the math behind them, and why that was physics. Most interesting physics demonstrations involve statics, harmonic oscillation, analytical mechanics - physical motion - or at least the interesting ones do.

Sometimes we'd just start the week with letting people ask questions about things that made them curious that might be related to physics.

Here's a list of projects we did, and which your students could do:

- build bridges out of balsa wood to demonstrate statics principles and the ability to bear loads (by loading them up until they break)
- build water balloon catapults and see who throws the balloons farthest
- build ping-pong ball alcohol canons
- launch model rockets, preferably with instrument payloads
- build hover crafts using vacuum cleaner motors and race them down the hallway past the principals office
- build a Focault's pendulum to demonstrate rotation of the earth
- put a bowing ball on the end of a rope and show it doesn't smack you in the face because you let it go and it doesn't get energy added to the system on its way back
- demonstrate the coefficient of sliding friction with a triangle block, a square block with a hile drilled through it, some twine tied through the hole, and a fishing scale
- build a model roller coaster
- build a tesla coil and use it to shoot aluminum rings cut from the ends of pipes up in the air
- build a blower box with an orange traffic cone glued on top and float a ball there to demonstrate Bernoulli's principle
- dig out the switch/relay/light boxes from the 1960's classes and wire them all together to build an adder
- use a Van de Graff generator to make people's hair stand out straight from their heads
- show them a Newton's Cradle execu-toy
- put grapes in a microwave oven to demonstrate plasmas
- make little boats with wedges in their backs, stick pieces of soap there, and race them to demonstrate surface tension
- spin buckets of water without the water falling out
- shock people with Leyden jars
- build a Wimshurst generator
- build a Sterling cycle engine with a bicycle wheel and rubber bands

And that is just stuff we DID, off the top of my head, 20+ years ago -- stuff I still REMEMBER to this day, in my day job as a SCIENTIST -- because I had a great physics teacher in High School.

-- Terry

Science in the real world is NOT that interesting

[petes_PoV (912422)]

It mostly involves attending meetings to try and get funding for your next year, or your research students (they're the people who actually *do* the work) or that piece of equipment you want/need. To do this you have to sell your case and make it appear better, more cost-effective, likely to bring credit, than all the other scientists who are after the same money and are therefore trying to discredit your proposal.

When you're not doing that, you are desperately trying to find a new angle on old data to write a paper for publication. You need to do this in order to keep your reputation (and therefore pay and ability to get funding) hot. Once written, you'll spend more time trying to get it published somewhere, or peer-reviewing some other guy's paper.

Almost never will you get into the lab, and even when you do most of your time will be spent setting up, calibrating, tweaking, debugging and modifying your equipment. The chances of you making a discovery that will be named after you are infinitesimally small, as all the good ones are already taken. Even then, you'll probably be dead before anyone recognises the contribution you have made - or the true value of your work.

You best bet, if you want your children to become successful scientists, is to teach them how to stay awake in meetings, diss their colleagues while appearing to be friendly, engaging in office politics, learning to recognise who to scmooze and kiss up to and marketing old ideas with a new spin - every year for the rest of their careers.