Science Adventure Lab Blog

After the last school visit in June, you might expect that the Science Adventure Lab team pauses to take a collective breath following a fast-paced season of travel across Washington. However, summer is actually the time when everything except school visits jumps into high gear: conferences, curriculum development, fundraising, vehicle maintenance and a variety of student and teacher visits to the Research Institute.

The “summer” started quickly this year, with the national Mobile Laboratory Coalition annual meeting in Rockville, MD barely two weeks after the last school visit.  We demonstrated our unique respiration/asthma module at the conference, and showed off the new ‘clicker’ remote evaluation tool that was piloted this year (to find out more about the clickers, check out the Spring 2011 newsletter).  After learning about new developments in other programs, we came back re-energized and excited about progress in the field, but also with the knowledge that we remain on the cutting-edge of mobile science education.

Just days after returning from the conference, our season of special events began. First, we took the Science Adventure Lab to the races as part of the SOVREN Guild’s annual Pacific Northwest Historics Vintage Car Race. Next, a steady stream of students, teachers and representatives from other local outreach programs visited Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the Science Adventure Lab for education, enrichment, professional development and collaboration.

• As part of a weeklong experience at Seattle Children’s, we hosted students from the University of Washington’s U-DOC program.  U-DOC is a high school summer enrichment program that seeks to foster, affirm and encourage students’ interest in the healthcare professions.

• Four teachers from the Science Education Partnership Program at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center worked with scientist mentors at Seattle Children’s Research Institute through the Science Adventure Lab’s professional development program.

• Working with the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research and their CURE program (Collaborations to Understand Research and Ethics), we exposed a number of high school teachers from around the country to new approaches in science inquiry and evaluation.

• A large group of middle and high school students from the Native Youth Enrichment Program at the University of Washington came to learn from Children’s experts on diabetes and to experience the Science Adventure Lab module Seeking the Sugar Solution.

In between these events, we have been working tirelessly to develop a new module, create three videos, fine-tune some post-visit activity material, launch a new web-based interactive tool, formalize evaluation assessments, perform major maintenance on the mobile lab, and apply for numerous grants.

And of course, we have been getting ready for the new school year by scheduling over 80 visits across the state. So, as you can see, the summer is actually one of the most productive times for the Science Adventure Lab team.

By Dr. Mark Ruffo

Each year on the weekend prior to July 4th, vintage Ferraris, Corvettes, Porsches, and Lotuses zoom around the track at Pacific Raceways in Kent in the Pacific Northwest Historics Races.  It wasn’t hard to miss the Science Adventure Lab on display among the 300 rare and vintage cars.  Spectators attending the races had the chance to tour the Science Adventure Lab, try out some of the equipment used by students and even isolate the DNA from strawberries. Not surprisingly, many car enthusiasts were quite interested in the 38,000 pound, 425 horsepower, custom-built vehicle.

The Pacific Northwest Historics Races are hosted by the SOVREN (Society of Vintage Racing Enthusiasts) Guild and benefit Seattle Children’s. The guild was chartered in 1991 and has contributed more than $8 million to uncompensated care and other programs at Children’s. The SOVREN guild has been a generous supporter of the Science Adventure Lab since 2010.

Earlier this year, guild president Stevyn Anthony and his daughter Kailey attended a school visit to see the Science Adventure Lab team in action. Stevyn and Kailey donned lab coats, safety glasses and gloves and helped Science Adventure Lab scientists lead students at Kenmore Elementary through the chemistry and nutrition module.

Thanks to support from the SOVREN guild, the Science Adventure Lab is able to visit more schools across Washington State providing students with critically-needed access to cutting-edge science and health education.

By Jeremy Kim, Mobile Lab Scientist

In June the Science Adventure Lab team wrapped up a second successful year of visiting schools around the state.  Between September and June the Science Adventure Lab visited 63 schools (which is 9 more than in the previous year), and more than 6,200 students participated in the program.  This brings the totals for the two years that the program has been operating to 12,600 students at 85 different schools across the state, quite an accomplishment!  Over the past two years, we’ve traveled more than 16,000 miles in our quest to visit every part of the state.

As with the previous year, most of the school visits were along the I-5 corridor, but we also visited schools in the Tri-Cities, and the Spokane and Vancouver areas.  We made two trips to the scenic Washington coast; one to visit the schools in Neah Bay, and the other to Willapa Bay to visit schools in Raymond and Westport.

2010-2011 Science Adventure Lab school visits

We give highest priority to visits to high-needs schools.  One metric we use to identify these schools is the percentage of students that are in free and reduced lunch programs.  Across the state, ~40% of students are receiving free or reduced lunches.  At the schools that we visited last year, 64% of students were receiving free or reduced lunch.  This suggests that we are successfully reaching students who will benefit most from the exposure to the authentic laboratory experiences, cool equipment and the real scientists that the Science Adventure Lab program provides.

Student voting devices were used for the first time this year to collect real time feedback from our students.  We call them clickers and they allow us to collect feedback from all students in the class, not just the ones who raise their hands to answer our questions.  Questions are incorporated into the module presentations that we use to lead students through their experiments. The questions measure several important things, including the students’ understanding of the experiment, their attitude toward science and their interest in pursuing a career in science. Their responses can be displayed in real time for immediate feedback or kept from view for us to review later. We will be scaling up the use of clickers for next year so that we collect data about the effectiveness of our program in a more rigorous  and systematic way.

The Science Adventure Lab team ended the school year with a trip in June to Rockville MD for the annual conference of the Mobile Laboratory Coalition. The Mobile Lab Coalition is the partnership of traveling laboratory programs like the Science Adventure Lab and institutions of higher education that do science education outreach. The coalition members meet annually to share best practices, curriculum and evaluation data.  We attended sessions on safety on the mobile lab, responsive science teaching, interacting with the media and more. We presented one of our novel curriculum modules Catch Your Breath! Exploring Respiratory Function and Asthma, which was very well received.

As the 2011/12 school year begins, we look forward to another great year of school visits and more opportunities to inspire students to become the scientists of tomorrow.
By Dr. Mark Ruffo