Educational Outreach
We are deeply invested in foundational scienctific pedagogy. To enrich science education in the Providence community our lab regularly engages in science educational outreach activities.
In each of our educational outreach activies our goals are to provide foundational understanding of the scientific method and to foster enthusiasm for science. We welcome discussions of science pedagogy and requests for assistance.
In recent years we have provided science training and resources to area high school and middle school students performing microbiology experiments as part of their science fair projects. We have also conducted science education enrichment for elementary school students.
For examples of recent outreach activites, see below.
February 27-28, 2014
Microbiology experiment with 1st grade students at St. Pius V School, Providence, RI
Materials:
- Petri plates with tryptic soy agar (1+ per student)
- Sterile saline (1+ tube per student)
- Sterile cotton swabs (2+ per student)
- Lab markers (1+ per student)
- Lab notebooks (1 per student)
- Giant Fuzzy Microbe prop (Escherichia coli cell).
Day 1:
- Provided each student with a science notebook.
- Introduced students to bacteria as a living organism.
- Discussed where bacteria are found (everywhere!) and their size.
- Noted that most bacteria do not cause disease.
- Talked about hand sanitizer as a bacteriocidal agent.
- Introduced experimental design to test whether hand sanitizer can reduce numbers of living bacteria on hands.
- Demonstrated to students how to sample bacteria on their hands before and after hand sanitizer treatment.
- Each student performed their own experiment to test our hypothesis that hand sanitizer kills bacteria.
Day 2:
- Examined Petri plates with students and encouraged them to describe the colonies they observed - color, texture, size, luster, etc.
- Counted colonies on both the "before hand sanitizer" and "after hand sanitizer" sectors.
- Students recorded data in tables in their notebooks.
- Examined the class data pool and discussed what we can conclude from the data.
- Discussed how there are many different types of bacteria and that many bacteria are helpful (food, antibiotic production).
We photographed the students' plates and gave them color printouts of their data to put in their notebooks. See below for our data and for the thank you cards the students made for us. The Giant Fuzzy Microbe clearly made an impression. :)
