“You don't need a lab to do
science – you just need a kitchen,” says Professor of Chemistry Charles Scaife.
In fact, if you're visiting the Scaifes' family kitchen, on some days you're
likely to find “science going on, not supper.”
The
excitement of hands-on science has taken Scaife and his wife, Priscilla, far
beyond the Union campus. During two unusual sabbaticals, he visited no
university, did no research, wrote no paper, working instead with elementary
schoolchildren (to date, more than 35,000 of them) to spark an interest in the
marvels of science.
Wearing
white labcoats decorated by their daughters with balloons, hearts, apples,
snakes, and chemical formulas, the Scaifes use everyday items — balloons,
Alka-Seltzer tablets, rulers, vinegar, baking soda, empty film canisters,
magnets, breakfast cereal, pennies, Ziploc bags — to demonstrate scientific
principles in a way that taps into kids' natural curiosity.
Says
Scaife, “Kids need that hands-on aspect. Teachers do, too – one of our tasks is
to make teachers comfortable, let them see, hey, this isn't hard to do. And
that they can teach science even with limited resources.”
They
conduct interactive science classes in the schools during the day, and in the
evening, hold Family Science Nights. Their sabbaticals have been so rewarding,
in fact, that the Scaifes will devote more of their time to this work after his
retirement, which begins this summer.
The
idea of teaching hands-on science to kids was born in 1986. Scaife had been
working for NASA on a crystal-growing project, which was destroyed in the
Challenger space shuttle explosion. Asked to talk to schools about the
disaster, he began to perceive a low level of interest in and understanding of
science, and to realize how little science was being taught. “We're talking
about elementary schools now – science may be in the curriculum, but teachers
may or may not have taken science themselves, and they're uncomfortable with
it. Those who do teach science often do so directly from a textbook, so it's
dry, it's dull, it's not fun.”
It
was during his first sabbatical, in 1994, that the Scaifes were able to take
their idea on the road. The day when a front-page Wall Street Journal
article featured Scaife's work, a rash of phone calls ensued. “This was during
break, so we were down at our cabin in Pennsylvania. Nobody supposedly knew
where we were, but at 8 a.m. that day, calls started coming in. By 11 a.m.,
calls from the West Coast kicked in. Some people even wanted to contribute to
what we were doing and asked where they could send a check!”
That's
when the program took off. “Most of what we end up doing now is through word of
mouth,” says Scaife. “They ask me how we advertise? I say, 'As little as possible!'
“
In
Albuquerque for five weeks of last year's sabbatical, the Scaifes taught in
fourteen schools – “a large enough proportion that we really had an impact. One
teacher volunteered to serve as Family Science Night coordinator. Sandia Labs,
which helped host and pay for our stay, has since mimicked our Family Science
night kit, and is making it, along with their scientists, available to the
schools. Albuquerque seems a good model. If you can get schools together, your
effort is more likely to sustain itself.”
These
days, the Scaifes are also giving training workshops for retirees and
scientists, and they're making appearances in museums and libraries. They're
even training students to give science presentations at birthday parties.
Community
service has been central to the Scaifes, who have been active in financially
supporting overseas missions and Habitat for Humanity projects, as well as
leading groups of teenagers in summer home repair initiatives through Reach, a
national, nondenominational church group. As with the science shows, says
Scaife: “The work motivates the kids –
they get a real sense of their abilities.”
How
does he keep up with the demand for his science program? “It helps that
Priscilla is very organized. She has clotheslines strung up in the attic, where
she hangs labeled Ziploc bags, in alphabetical order.”
But
sometimes the demand is still too great to meet. “You can't be concerned with
that,” says Scaife. “I guess I've learned how to say no, or 'not this year, but
maybe next year.' “
(SIDEBAR)
Selected
experiments from the Scaife's traveling science classes:
— Filling a Ziploc bag with water and then pushing
a pencil into it (because the polymer seals right up, no one gets wet)
— Dangling washers on a string hanging from the
ceiling to demonstrate that the shorter a pendulum, the faster it moves
Dissolving Alka-Seltzer tablets in hot and cold
water to show how heat speeds up most chemical reactions
— Having kids make constellation viewers out of
film canisters and learn to identify some constellations
— Using an eyedropper, seeing how many drops of
water can accumulate on the surface of a penny — to illustrate surface tension
of water
— Extracting iron filings from crushed Total
cereal using a magnet.
— Holding a paper cup containing water over a candle
to show that water absorbs heat and keeps the paper from getting hot enough to
burn
— Blowing through a straw to turn an acid-based
lavender liquid clear as carbon dioxide bubbles through it
— Playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a yardstick
to demonstrate the relationship between math and music.
— Floating a pencil in salt water and fresh water,
determining what fraction of the pencil was above the surface, to demonstrate
additional buoyancy of salt water.
You can find some of these experiments on the Union
College kids' website (www.kids.union.edu), with more to come. The site also
includes information on the program, future workshops, book reviews and other
resources, and related links.