The artist Pablo Picasso once said that all children are born artists and that the trick is to stay that way as an adult. I believe that all children have an inner scientist, and we need to get them in touch with their inner scientist. The way to do this is to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.

Sadly, the kind of expansive thinking, problem solving and curiosity that is inspired by good STEM teaching is taught out of kids because of the emphasis on testing and rote learning. Every year, millions of children enter kindergarten armed with a one-word question: “Why?”

Curious and interested, they unceasingly ask for explanations about everything and anything. Parents and caretakers do their best to come up with answers to the problem at hand, but behind each child’s question is another follow-up question. And another. And another. As trying as this process may be for adults, this constant questioning is a vital activity for children. Their brains are busily creating pathways; they are learning, and they are learning how to learn. They are mini-scientists trying to understand how the world works.

But when these curious creatures start school, sadly, along the way, the unending questions begin to fade away. As a long-time instructor, I’ve become accustomed to this silence in my materials science class, particularly when I am teaching something that is unfamiliar to most students and might be challenging. I’ll pause and ask, “Any questions?” Often, there are none. Students will slouch in their desks and avert their eyes as I try to make eye contact. They cannot show weakness. They want to say something but often second-guess their own curiosity, wondering if asking any question will make them look stupid in front of their classmates.

The components of STEM not only build economies, but also build children’s minds and provide an ecology that is needed for their emotional and intellectual development. STEM supports growth in areas like interacting with others and with one’s surroundings, building concepts, forming connections, engaging in communication, and seeking discovery. These are developmental stages that make children whole, empathetic, resilient, creative, and happy adults.

To get education back on track in America, we need to have a multipronged approach through which we inspire and engage students with STEM.

Make it fun

Making STEM fun is a major ingredient to making it grow in popularity among citizens. If children cannot get STEM in school, we need to bring STEM to them, and bring it to the schoolyard, the malls, and the Web. We need to put fun science and math everywhere. Wherever young people are hanging out, we need to create engaging STEM opportunities. This could be 3-D printers at Starbucks and in the mall; more playful science mobile apps on cell phones (like Angry Birds); and science concepts stealthily embedded in popular music (“She Blinded Me with Science” remix, anyone?). When I was growing up, I tuned in to Mission Impossible and MacGyver. Programming like this can inspire the next generation with fun problem solving, and be a whole lot of fun to watch.

In addition, we need bookmobile-style STEM buses in school parking lots; science museum exhibits at malls, McDonald’s and libraries; inexpensive science kits at bodegas; and local science festivals (with satellites in every neighborhood or free transportation). My dream would be for a recording artist to sing songs about STEM so that these concepts get to children over the airwaves.

Starting early, parents should try to make math fun by peppering in real-world problems when possible. Make it a game! On your way to grandma’s house, figure out how long it will take. When making cookies, use fractions to figure out smaller batches. Encouraging curiosity is the first step to combating innumeracy (that is, math illiteracy). And we need to keep it going as kids grow. Adding math to popular culture for all ages can only help — for instance, television shows like Numb3rs (a former crime drama, aimed at teens and adults), math museums like the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan, and fun books like the Manga Math Mysteries, which capitalizes on the popularity of graphic novels. All of these are pathways to encourage exposure to and an affinity for math. Coupling these efforts with compelling math classes taught by math experts would certainly right this math boat. To get STEM on track, we’ve got to do the math (right).

Emphasize success through failure

In STEM, failure is a fact of life. The whole process of discovery is trial and error. When you innovate, you fail your way to your answer. You make a series of choices that don’t work until you find the one that does. Discoveries are made one failure at a time. One of the basic tenets of design and engineering is that one must fail to succeed. There are whole books written on this topic. In civil engineering, every bridge we’ve traveled across was built upon failed attempts that taught us something (and cost many lives). It was all trial and error. Scientists fail all the time. We just brand it differently. We call it data.

Not just in STEM but in life, too, failure is a fact. You are lucky if you get to learn from it. Dealing with failure in science gives you fortitude and patience that you would be hard-pressed to get anywhere else.

“Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up,” as the Chinese proverb says. Now, I do not wish failure on anyone, but if children have to learn it, I would choose a controlled and safe environment like a STEM class experiment. Here, they learn to try again. STEM provides failure training wheels.

I’ve already noted that, because of its innate rigidity, standardized testing teaches skills that are counter to fundamental STEM skills like problem solving, learning from failure, and developing curiosity. In fact, the very act of standardized testing has the unfortunate side effect of reducing interest in a topic. Motivation studies indicate that the attention to performance (grades, test scores, or any evaluation) actually steer students away from loving a subject.

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Apollo 13 is when a group of engineers has to make a life-saving carbon dioxide scrubber, using random items located on the space module. This requires a problem-solving mindset to get to a solution. I love this scene because, as scary as it is, it portrays the moment engineers live for — when they go from rocket scientist to rock star. And the movie captures the tension and passion of the engineers. Essentially, they had to fit a round peg (the air hose) to a square hole (the square filters) and only had a few binders, zipper-top moon-rock bags, a hose, a pair of socks, a bungee cord, and duct tape. The skills they draw on are, at their very core, STEM skills.

If you think about the type of student who is successful with standardized tests, it would not be a leap to think that standardized testing would not have been able to get Neil Armstrong on the moon. Innovation and invention require a greater intimacy with concepts than standardized tests require and a passionate curiosity that they don’t seem to inspire.

Here are some things Parents can do:

• Participate in local science fairs and festivals.
• Go to your local science museum.
• Take stuff apart with your kids.
• Try the experiment below (not in the book).

Making Friends with Failure:  Swinging Buckets of Water

Materials: (This experiment is best done outside)

• A small bucket (like one for the beach)
• A plastic cup
• Water

Procedure:

Fill the bucket with water and grab the handle. Now, swing the bucket in a vertical circle with your arm extended above your head, across from you and then back along your side again.  Try different speeds and see how slow you can go before you spill the water. Remember to have fun.  It is just water. (Getting wet is not failure but data collection.)

Try a more challenging experiment and do the same thing but this time swing water in a plastic cup. Can you swing the cup over your head and back down again without spilling the water?   (Hint: hold the cup in your hand with your index finger being closest to the base of the cup.  Your hand is upside down to how you would conventionally hold a cup. Now, swing your arms out in a circular path with the cup and see what happens.)

Explanation:

The person swinging the bucket is spared from being doused with water because the force pushing on the water that keeps it in the bucket is greater than gravity.  When the bucket is upside down, usually the water in it would fall out, but because of inertia acting on the water, it stays in the bucket.  This force of inertia is greater than gravity, which keeps the poor soul swinging the bucket from getting wet.   Inertia is the same effect you feel as a passenger when you are squished to one side as a car makes tight corner.

We can do this

The skills of the 21^st century need us to create scholars who can link the unlinkable; those who are willing to try many combinations before finding the right answer and those who are comfortable with concepts that they can play with in new creative ways. Improving STEM education is vital to human development and economic development. STEM education empowers children to create a better planet than the one they inherit. Nurturing curious, creative problem solvers who can master the art of figuring things out will make them ready for this unknown brave new world.

And that is the best legacy we can possibly leave.

Guest post by math educators Maria Droujkova and Yelena McManaman, authors of the new family math book “Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd”

Children dream big. They crave exciting and beautiful adventures and they love to pretend-play. Just ask them who they want to be when they grow up. The answers will run the gamut from astronauts to zoologists and from ballerinas to Jedi masters. So how come children don’t dream of becoming mathematicians?

Kids don’t dream of becoming mathematicians because they already are mathematicians. Children have more imagination than it takes to do differential calculus. They are frequently all too literate like logicians and precise like set theorists. They are persistent, fascinated with strange outcomes and are out to explore the “what-if” scenarios. These are the qualities of good mathematicians!

As for mathematics itself, it’s one of the most adventurous endeavors a young child can experience. Mathematics is exotic, even bizarre. It is surprising and unpredictable. And it can be more exciting, scary and dangerous than sailing the high seas!

But most parents and educators don’t present math this way. They just want the children to develop their mathematical skills rather than going for something more nebulous, like the mathematical state of mind. They try to reduce the struggle and danger, not celebrate it – with good intentions, such as safety and security. So they introduce the tame, accessible scraps of math, starting with counting, shapes and simple patterns. In the process, they leave everything else mathematical behind, “for when the kids are ready.” For the vast majority of kids, that readiness never comes. Their math stays simplified, impoverished, and limited. That’s because you can’t get there from here. If you don’t start walking the path of those exotic and dangerous math adventures, you never arrive.

It is as tragic as if parents were to read nothing but the alphabet to children, until they were “ready” for something more complex. Or if kids had to learn “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” by heart before being allowed to listen to more involved music. Or if they were not allowed on a slide until they, well, learned to slide down in a completely safe manner. This would be sad and frustrating, wouldn’t it? Yet that’s exactly what happens with early math. Instead of math adventures – observations, meaningful play and discovery of complex systems – children get primitive, simplistic math. This is boring not only to children, but to adults as well. And boredom leads to frustration. The excitement of an adventure is replaced by the gnawing anxiety of busy work.

We want to create rich, multi-sensory, deeply mathematical experiences for young children. As we show in our new Creative Commons book, Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd, with a bit of know-how every parent and teacher can stage exciting, meaningful and beautiful early math experiences. It doesn’t take any fancy equipment or software beyond everyday household or outdoor items, and a bit of imagination – which can be borrowed from other parents in our online community. We make rich mathematical properties of everyday objects accessible to young children. Everything around us becomes a learning tool, a prompt full of possibilities for math improvisation, a conversation starter. The everyday world of children turns into a mathematical playground.

Children marvel as snowflakes magically become fractals, inviting explorations of infinity, symmetry and recursion. Cookies offer gameplay in combinatorics and calculus. Paint chips come in beautiful gradients, and floor tiles form tessellations. Bedtime routines turn into children’s first algorithms. Cooking, then mashing potatoes (and not the other way around!) humorously introduces commutative property. Noticing and exploring math becomes a lot more interesting, even addictive. Unlike simplistic math that quickly becomes boring, these deep experiences remain fresh, because they grow together with children’s and parents’ understanding of mathematics.

The most frequently asked question we get is: “How can parents not familiar with advanced math recognize it, point it out to children and create meaningful conversations and activities around it?” Here are some things you can do.

●      Play. Relax about learning goals, don’t worry about having correct answers. Fool around, experiment, seek multiple silly ways of doing things. Enthusiastically say “ yes” to all the child’s ideas.  Can we make a triangle with four angles? What would you call it? Would this name work for all shapes with four angles? Can we build an upside-down pyramid with blocks? Or play a Make Your Own Grid game with paint chips, sticky notes or rectangular picture cards as tiles. Prepare a certain number of tiles and try to use them all for a full grid. What happens if you have 7, 11 or 13 tiles? What numbers can form a full grid?

●      Seek. Use online image and video searches to start chains of discoveries. Search for a math word, such as “patterns,” related to what your child is learning. Now search for this math word but add “in nature”, “art”, “building blocks”, or whatever your child is interested in. It is amazing how many beautiful math pictures come up in for, say, “pattern cat”, “angles in nature”, and “ocean symmetry”. Then poke around sites where these pictures are. Children love to sit in your lap and point at pretty things when you do that. For more ideas, follow our weekly Math Goggles challenge, which offers tips for discovering math in everyday things.

●      Ask. Find welcoming places for math adventures. Ask questions online, including on our site, and offline – at museums, puzzle and game stores, parent gatherings. Share even simple experiences of creating a math environment for your children. Early math adventures make for excellent starters of friendly conversations and occasional passionate arguments.

●      Make. As math is more than counting, so it is more than writing down numbers and drawing shapes. Art and craft activities are an integral part of mathematical learning and come up in every chapter of our book. For example, the game of Two-Hand Mirror teaches about bilateral symmetry, reflection and chirality. To play, draw a vertical line through the middle of a sheet of paper. Tape the paper to a table because your child will be drawing with both hands, holding a marker in each. Imagine that the middle line is a mirror. Explain to your child that his or her hands must move symmetrically at every moment – they should be the same distance from the line of symmetry, they should move at the same speed and in the same direction relative to the line of symmetry (up, down, in or out). From time to time pause to check the drawing in a real mirror by placing it on the line of symmetry, and compare the reflection to the actual drawing. Then, still holding a real mirror, have the child trace the drawing with her dominant hand and observe what her hand’s reflection does in the mirror  What happens to the reflection as the hand moves up, down and around?

Can math be interesting? A lot of it already is. Can your children be strong at advanced math? They are natural geniuses at some aspects of it. Your mission, should you accept it: to join thrilling young math adventures.

About the Authors

Dr. Maria Droujkova is a parent, curriculum developer and mathematics education consultant. Maria brings together leaders in mathematics education, researchers, developers, parents and teachers for projects and discussions of family mathematics, early algebra, individualized instruction, math games and math clubs.

Yelena McManaman is a blogger, education consultant and developer, focusing on young children. Yelena homeschools her son and organizes STEM classes and events for kids. Online, Yelena helps other parents collaborate around advanced math for young children.

The book, Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd, was released in April, 2013.

A student from High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey CREDIT: Marissa Hazel

Guest Post by Jonathan Olsen and Sarah Gross, teachers at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey

Women and girls are historically underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields and much has been written lately about why girls in school seem disinterested in these areas.  As STEM becomes more important in our increasingly interconnected global society, it becomes even more imperative that educators find ways to encourage girls to participate in these fields.

A few weeks ago, researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Michigan released the results of a study that reflected many girls’ antipathy toward all things STEM.  The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, tracked about 1500 college-bound students over a decade and found that more women had the highest scores on both the math and the verbal portion of the SAT test than their male counterparts.  These women were more likely to pursue non-STEM careers after graduation even though they excelled in those fields in school. As the principal researcher of the study, Ming-Te Wang, summarizes, “This highlights the need for educators and policy makers to shift the focus away from trying to strengthen girls’ STEM-related abilities and instead tap the potential of these girls who are highly skilled in both the math and verbal domains to go into STEM fields.”  We couldn’t agree more.

As educators in a STEM-focused high school, we come in contact with intellectually gifted female scientists every day–albeit young ones.  We also know there aren’t enough of them.   As a school, we struggle to attract young women who want to attend an engineering-focused high school in the first place.  In our time here, we’ve never had more girls than boys in any given class. Too often, our gender ratio is lopsided.  We know that this is not a result of ability.  As the Pittsburg-Michigan study showed, and what we experience every day in our classrooms, is that there is no shortage of girls who could successfully pursue anything they wanted.  The girls in our school are brilliant and many do pursue careers in STEM-related fields.  However, some choose not to, and other smart girls never even make it through our front door. Why not?

Perhaps girls with high verbal scores choose careers other than STEM because their passion hasn’t been kindled in those classes. We know it is not the fault of their teachers but a problem of process.  For many schools, arts and sciences are rarely ever integrated.  Teachers are kept apart with little time to collaborate.

If integration does happen, it is usually the humanities teacher looking to include aspects of STEM in their courses.  The recent adoption of the Common Core Standards by forty-five states calls for more integration between subjects.  However, ask most humanities teachers and they will tell you that they are being told to integrate STEM content into their classes, removing literature for nonfiction, rather than being given the opportunity to collaborate with their STEM counterparts.  Integration is wonderfully effective and certainly the future of education but it is a two-way street.  We think schools should use reciprocal integration between the arts and sciences to capture the imagination of these top female students.

How many engineering teachers include a fiction book like Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano in their syllabi?  Do many math teachers analyze the intricacies of M. C. Escher’s artwork with their students or read Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo? How many science teachers read aloud the poetic observations of Dr. David George Haskell?  Do many biology teachers share the story of the HeLa cells?  We think ideas like these should be a part of all STEM curricula.  And experts agree. The Next Generation Science Standards, released for public discussion last week, ask teachers to show students how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.  And we believe that incorporating more storytelling into science can help do this.

Research has shown that storytelling activates the brain beyond mere word recognition.  In 2006, researchers in Spain discovered that stories stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Last year, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that similes and metaphors can activate sensory portions of the brain, and the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France discovered that action words can stimulate the motor cortex.  So if, as the recent study in Psychological Science shows, female students with high ability in both math and verbal areas tend to steer away from STEM careers, maybe it’s time to bring more of those verbal skills into the STEM classes for the benefit of these students.

The importance of storytelling in science has been growing over the last few years as scientists work to communicate with the general public and stimulate more critical thinking about important issues.  Cornell University’s Bruce Lewenstein, a professor of communication, leads an annual workshop to teach science storytelling to scientists.  This year, the World Science Festival will include a special event called “Science & Story: The Art of Communicating Science Across All Media.”  Scientists recognize that science and storytelling are intertwined. Unfortunately, all too often students are introduced to science through uninspiring textbooks and fact-laden lectures by teachers who mean well but must stick to a curriculum dictated by standardized testing.  In many of the schools from which we receive students, science has been relegated to a half-year curriculum or a few days per week.  These teachers are faced with the challenge of squeezing the stories of science into textbook readings and workbook pages.

Think of a typical high school biology class.  The advances in cellular biology over just the past five years could fill a book. Textbooks are outdated by the time they are printed.  So instead of worrying about teaching students every fact about cell biology, why not embrace the stories of cellular biology and teach students to think like biologists?  The Common Core Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards both ask teachers to help students dig deeper into fewer topics, but teach students to engage critically with science and technology.  Biology teachers can do this by bringing reading and writing into their classroom. Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the true story of a poor black farmer whose cells—taken without her consent in 1951—have become one of the most important tools in medicine.  The cells helped in the development of the polio vaccine and are crucial to advances in cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and much more. Reading the book can introduce students not just to cellular biology but also to issues like class, race, and bioethics. Instead of reading from a textbook they would be engaged and growing as global citizens who can think critically as they analyze the narrative of science rather than just the data.

History is full of examples of what we now call polymaths.  We’re familiar with Omar Khayyám, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin.  But what about Hypatia, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, or Hildegard of Bingen? The arts weren’t subservient to the other STEM-related passions in any of these individuals.  Instead, the arts and sciences were equally embraced with one fueling the other.  If teachers taught STEM subjects through the lens of story we think many of those high-achieving girls with astronomical verbal scores might be more interested.  It sure beats a pink microscope.

Jonathan Olsen (@jonathanaolsen on Twitter) and Sarah Gross (@thereadingzone on Twitter) team-teach an integrated humanities, science, and technology program to ninth grade students at High Technology High School in Lincroft, New Jersey. High Technology is ranked the #1 STEM high school in the nation by U.S. News. Jonathan and Sarah are regular contributors to the New York Times Learning Network and their writing has appeared in Edutopia, ASCD, and The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet. Sarah also helps teach a middle school science enrichment program through the STARS Challenge program at Monmouth University. Jonathan serves as his district’s curriculum supervisor.

More on the Next Generation Science Standards:

States Say Evolution and Climate Change Should Be Taught in Schools

Will The New Science Standards Can Teach Young Earthers

A Preschooler touches a porcupine pufferfish that her science teacher brought in. Via mtsofan on Flickr.

A group of Tier 1 research universities — the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world – will join the White House-led effort to train 100,000 new math and science teachers by the year 2022. A $22.5 million gift from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced by the White House Monday morning, will make it possible to expand a successful teacher-training program called UTeach to 10 top research schools  over the next five years. “Historically, Tier 1 universities have not been focused on turning out teachers through their science and math departments,” said Tom Luce, the founding CEO and chairman of the National Math and Science Initiative, the group that is leading the expansion effort, in an interview following Monday morning’s announcement. They are focused on turning out PhD students, and they will continue to do so, he said, but the gift will help emphasize that educating new teachers is a mission that all universities “need to embrace if we’re going to reach our goal.”

The mission of training 100,000 new STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teachers originates from a 2010 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, “Prepare and Inspire: K-12 Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) For America’s Future.” President Barack Obama first mentioned the goal in his 2011 State of the Union Address, saying, “over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”

UTeach, which began at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997, is based on the idea espoused by many education experts that highly effective science and math teachers need deep knowledge of their subject area, plus outstanding pedagogical skills. But few U.S. STEM teachers have that combination. Only 52 percent of high school mathematics teachers and 61 percent of high school science teachers hold a major in the disciplines they teach, according to a February report from Horizon Research. In middle-schools, only 26 percent of science teachers and 23 percent of math teachers majored in their subjects.

UTeach instills both sets of skills in its students. The program is a collaboration among a university’s schools of education, liberal arts and sciences and local school districts.  It recruits undergraduate math and science majors to pursue teaching careers, and students graduate in four years with both a STEM major and all the courses needed for a teaching certification.

The program is also noted for its high retention rate. More than 40 percent of all teachers leave the profession during their first five years. Among STEM teachers, two-thirds of attrition comes from job dissatisfaction. But UTeach reports that 82 percent of its graduates are still in the classroom five years later. In her August 2012 feature for SA, journalist Pat Wingert wrote: “UTeach credits those high numbers to the fact that it gives students lots of time in real classrooms right from the start, so they can decide if they like teaching or not,” says Mary Ann Rankin, former dean of the University of Texas at Austin’s natural sciences department, who helped launch the program. “Some are seduced once they have a really fun experience and see how rewarding it can be.”

The White House is now nearly half-way toward its goal of 100,000 new STEM teachers. UTeach has grown rapidly, from a presence on 20 campuses in 2010, to 35 today. The HHMI funding will allow it to reach 45 schools, training an additional 1,750 STEM teachers, for a total of 17,000. But HHMI and UTeach are only one part of the effort. The group 100kin10, a coalition of 150 organizations lead by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, has pulled together additional resources to train around 30,000 teachers, for a grand total of 47,000. President Obama has also called for an $80 million federal investment to support evidence-based STEM teacher preparation programs.

Luce’s organization, the National Math and Science Initiative, posted a request for proposals from Tier One schools interested in implementing UTeach on their campuses Monday and hopes to select 10 within the next few months.

Bio-Rad's "Genes in a Bottle" Kit. CREDIT: Helene Brazier-Mitouart

Invited Guest Post by Helene Brazier-Mitouart

I have a Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Health and I am currently doing research in cancer biology as a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Besides having a passion for making scientific discoveries, I also have a great interest in teaching science to children. For this reason, I am part of an afterschool program lead by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) in partnership with the Department of Youth and Community Development. The program aims to bring the sciences to afterschool classrooms of 4^th to 8^th graders of New York City and Newark. For the last year I have been teaching a group of 5^th graders at a public school in Chinatown. Recently, Stephanie Wortel, the Education Program Coordinator for the NYAS gave me the opportunity to try a DNA extraction kit created by the company Bio-Rad with my class and then to write about it for Scientific American. That was an offer I couldn’t resist!

For me, the beauty of biology lies in the extraordinary mechanisms that control the development of an organism, in all the proteins that orchestrate complicated signaling pathways, and how so much of that complexity relies on tiny little DNA. I know that science can be hard to understand and conceptualize at times, especially when dealing with the microscopic. So imagine introducing genetic concepts to 10-year-old children. It is a challenge! In that spirit, Bio-Rad has developed a new kit, known as “Genes in a Bottle” to allow children (and curious adults!) to extract their own DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid, to be precise) from the cells in their mouths. The kit is available free of charge to scientists who volunteer in schools.

My students already knew a lot about DNA. They were able to explain to me that DNA was a twisted double helix and that the nucleotides A-T-C-G were coding the genetic information that makes us who we are. When I introduced the idea that they would get to see their own DNA using the Biorad kit, they were very enthusiastic and eager to start the experiment.

The first step in isolating our DNA was to gently scratch the inside of our cheeks with our teeth in order to release some cells from which we would be isolating our DNA. We gathered these cells by rinsing our mouths with water and then collecting this water in an experimental plastic tube. Next, we gently mixed the water containing our cells with a first solution called a “lysis buffer”. The lysis buffer contained a detergent that disrupted the lipid membrane of the cells. This step was allowing the contents of the cell, including the DNA and many types of proteins, to be released from the inside of the cell. My students immediately noticed the visible changes that were occurring in the reaction tube.

“Oh! There is some weird stuff in the tube!! What is it?” exclaimed one student.

“The contents of the cells have been released in your tube. This is mostly DNA mixed with proteins.” I replied.

“But we just want the DNA, right?” asked another student.

“Exactly! That’s why we will now need to destroy the proteins in order to isolate pure DNA.”

For this reason, the kids next added a few drops of protease to their tubes. The protease is a molecule (for science geeks, it’s an enzyme!) that is able to break down proteins into little pieces.

In order for the proteins to be degraded by the protease, the experimental tubes had to be incubated at 50°C (122°F). The students felt like they were chemists, checking the temperature on the thermometers over and over again! The reaction needed around 10 minutes to happen, and it was not easy for some of the students, who were full of energy and eager to get their DNA, to patiently wait for the reaction to occur.  At the end of the 10 minutes, the kids were holding their precious tubes, which contained a mix of broken lipids (destroyed by the detergent), broken proteins (destroyed by the protease), and DNA.

The final step in the isolation process was to make the DNA come out of the mixture. To do so, each student had to very slowly add cold alcohol to her tube. This caused the DNA to precipitate out of the solution, as DNA is less soluble in cold alcohol than in water. In addition, because we had added some salt to the solution, the DNA molecules aggregated together, generating a sort of tangled yarn-ball of DNA.

“Wow!” cried one student. “Is this white thing in my tube really my DNA?” I smiled and said: ”Yes it is!”

“And me? What about my tube? I have a lot of milky stuff! Are you sure it’s my DNA?”

“Yes it is” I assured them.

The DNA that the students were looking at with so much passion was the DNA from a few thousand cells in their mouths. This DNA contained millions of genes that together formed the recipe book that makes everyone who they are.

The students were very excited and compared their quantities of DNA with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, some of the students were also a little disappointed because they couldn’t see any DNA in their tubes. Of course it wasn’t because they didn’t have DNA in their cells, but that one of the reactions that was supposed to have occurred during the protocol didn’t take place. Being a scientist is not always easy and can be frustating, I explained, but it is worth the effort!

For the lucky ones, the Biorad kit contained little heart-shaped glass containers on a necklace to store the DNA. The students went home that day with the secret of their genetics proudly hanging around their necks. Even though some of my students were not successful at isolating their DNA with the Biorad kit, the excitement of the group as a whole made up for it. All of the kids learned a lot during this scientific activity, not only how to follow specific instructions and be active in understanding the experiment, but also to explore their own biology in a new way!

More to Explore:

* Here’s a link to Bio-Rad’s “Science Ambassador” program, which is offering the DNA kits free of charge to scientists who volunteer in classrooms.

* If you’re a scientist looking for volunteer opportunities or a teacher looking for a scientist to come to your class, visit our “1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days” project and sign up.

Invited Guest Post by Marissa Fessenden (@marisfessenden)

U.S. business and policy leaders have made it a priority to increase the number of students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and math, collectively known as STEM. But one source of STEM talent is often overlooked: young people with autism spectrum disorders. A study published late last year in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that students with autism choose majors in science, technology, engineering and math at higher rates than students in the general population. Yet students with autism enter college at far lower rates. The authors say the results highlight the need to encourage students with autism to pursue a post-secondary education and that doing so may strengthen participation in the STEM fields.

The only previous study to directly examine the connection between autism spectrum disorders and STEM majors was limited to a single university in the U.K. That paper, co-authored by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge, found a link between autism and mathematical talent. The new study, led by researchers at the independent research institute SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, examined 11,000 students across the country and found that more young adults with an autism spectrum disorder choose STEM majors than their peers in the general population (34.31 vs. 22.8 percent) as well as their peers in 10 other disability groups (which included visual disabilities, intellectual disabilities, speech and language impairment and others). Students with autism, however, were unlikely to enroll in college at all—their rate of enrollment was the third lowest of all disability categories.

One theory proposes that people with autism are above average on systemizing, which includes analysis and understanding of rule-based systems, and below average on empathizing, which refers to emotional and social thinking, says Xin Wei, a senior research analyst at the Center for Education and Human Services at SRI International and the study’s lead author. ”It may be that people with autism naturally think like scientists,” says Baron-Cohen. “They look for patterns, and, in science, you are always looking for patterns that you hope reflect a natural law.” He says Wei and her colleagues findings are not surprising—they jibe with Baron-Cohen’s own work. But he says he is worried that students with autism are underrepresented at universities.

Further research could point to strategies to boost enrollment among students with autism and thus STEM majors, says Julie Taylor, an assistant professor of pediatrics and investigator at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development. There are very few strategies that are commonly used, although more colleges are creating dedicated programs. Some strategies include giving students with autism a private room, without roommates, or providing guidance with organization and prioritizing tasks.

Baron-Cohen works with the disabilities resource center at the University of Cambridge and says it encourages parents of children with autism interested in enrolling to make contact with the university early—when they are 15 or 16 years old. Prospective students can visit the university and see the rooms where they will be interviewing during the application process. Students can familiarize themselves with lights and background noise—individuals with autism are often sensitive to sensory simulation—to give them a better shot for admission.

Wei and her colleagues are working on a series of papers that suggest actions to help students with autism enroll in post secondary education. The goal is to figure out what high schools can do to better prepare students with autism for college and beyond. The team is investigating high school factors linked to STEM participation—which classes best prepare students and how test performance is related to STEM enrollment, for example.

Science education is key to remaining competitive in a global economy, Wei says and adds, “it becomes imperative to discover previously untapped sources of STEM talent.” Students with autism could be one such source.

As our understanding of autism deepens, it may be necessary to change the way we think about the disorder, says Baron-Cohen. “We should think of it as a different way of thinking,” he says. “These individuals are attracted less to people and emotions but more to factual patterns. We should be focusing on the positive aspects of autism as well.”

IMAGE CREDIT: clemsonunivlibrary via flickr

Berger, with co-author Marc Aronson, has penned a book for children that describes the discovery, Berger’s career path, and how A. sediba fits into the story of human evolution. Though the book is recommended for ages 10 and up, I read it to my 6-year-old, who got the main gist and enjoyed the lifelike illustrations of early human ancestors like Lucy. For me, the book was an essential reminder of how much the field has changed. In high school, my generation was taught that human evolution proceeded in a straight line from, as Aronson writes, chimps, to chimpish animals that walked upright, to animals with larger brains that walked on two legs like Homo habilis, to humans, “so many different and puzzling branches of ancestors have been found that no one can say for sure which led to what.” As he explains, “We now believe that nature tried all sorts of experiments in the millions of years during which troops of animals that walked upright on two feet lived in Africa.”

“Skull in the Rock” is a great way to introduce young kids to evolution and to deepen older kids’ understanding of how humans came to be.

Reprinted with permission of the National Geographic Society from the book The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins by Lee R. Berger and Marc Aronson. Copyright ©2012 Lee R. Berger and Aronson & Glenn LLC.

Chapter One: The First Bone

“Dad, I’ve found a fossil.” Nine-year-old Matthew Berger was fossil hunting with his dad when he stumbled and spied a brown rock with a thin yellow bone stuck in it. Matthew was lucky: His father is Professor Lee Berger, a scientist who has devoted his life to finding the remains of our ancient ancestors. They had often gone exploring together in the brown limestone hills and scraggly trees just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. So many important fossils have been found in this area that it is called the Cradle of Humankind and is protected by the government and listed as a World Heritage Site.

Though only half an hour from one of the largest cities in Africa, the Cradle belongs to animals—visitors are watched by troops of baboons, dodged by scampering warthogs, measured by soaring eagles. The Bergers always bring their Rhodesian ridgebacks with them in their customized Jeep—since leopards and other predators prowl nearby, and the dogs smell and sense them in time to give warning. On this pleasant August morning in 2008, Matthew called out to his dad—and opened a door two million years back in time.

Some day, Matthew’s words may be famous, the way we honor “What hath God wrought?” the first telegraph message sent in 1844, or “Mr. Watson, come here” the first telephone call 32 years later. What he found was that important. But that is not what his dad first thought. Every other time they had gone out together, Matthew found the remains of ancient antelopes—fossils that are quite common in the area. As Dr. Berger came closer, Matthew could tell that his dad assumed it was just another old antelope and was trying to be nice by pretending to be interested. That is exactly what Dr. Berger was thinking until he was about fifteen feet (4.6 m) from his son, and could focus.

The clavicle bone that Matthew found. CREDIT: Courtesy of Lee Berger.

Right then, just at that precise moment, he froze. His world went black and white. Time stopped. Matthew was holding a gift from the past so precious almost nothing like it had ever been found. And the one person in the world who knew that for sure was Dr. Lee Berger. For the fossil was a clavicle, the thin connecting bone across the shoulder that humans and our ancestors share—and that athletes in contact sports sometimes break. The bone is so fragile, not one of the famous skeletons of prehumans still has a complete one. Yet when he was a graduate student, Dr. Berger had written his Ph.D. thesis on just that bone and three others that would become important in this story, the bones that make up the upper arm.

Because Matthew had trained his eyes, he recognized a fossil. Because his father had studied that part of the body, he realized the treasure in his son’s hands. For Dr. Berger, it would have been enough to find that one special bone. But the clavicle was just the beginning. It was the rabbit hole beckoning Alice, the wardrobe flung open to Narnia, the first clue to what is becoming an entirely new way of understanding human evolution.

It is easy to envy the Bergers, to wish you or I had the chance to find the bone, which turned out to be part of a nearly complete skeleton of an entirely new species (Australopithecus sediba) previously unknown to science. But as Dr. Berger says, that is getting it totally wrong. Because the most important thing about the find is the doors it opens for the next new discovery. Every door leads somewhere, even those that seem closed—that is what Dr. Berger’s own life story told him.

Image courtesy of Penn State and pennstatelive, via Flickr

Earlier today, a group of scientists, educators and policymakers released the newest draft of the Next Generation Science Standards, which lay out ambitious expectations for what elementary, middle and high school students should learn at each grade level. These guidelines affect virtually every child enrolled in public school, and advocates say they will revolutionize STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education in this country. Though the standards are voluntary, many policy watchers expect a majority of states to sign on, as they did with the Common Core State Standards in Math and Language Arts in 2010. I asked Michael Wysession, an author of the new standards and a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis, to explain why the science standards released today are so important.

Guest post by Michael Wysession, Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the Leadership Team for the writing of the Next Generation Science Standards. He has also served as the Earth and Space Science Design Team Leader for the National Research Council’s “A Framework for K-12 Science Education,” which informed the new standards.

It was 7:45 a.m. on December 21, 2012, and I was in the studio for St. Louis TV Channel 2 News. “Why are so many people convinced that the world is going to end today?” the anchorwoman asked, referring to the supposed ancient Mayan doomsday prophesy. I thought of talking about how precarious human civilization was – as Will Durant said, “Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.” I thought about the five major extinctions of life over the past half-billion years, the most recent being the end of the Cretaceous, when a rogue object from space DID hit the Earth, on the Yucatan peninsula, which, incidentally, was the home of the same Mayans whose calendar was ending today.

Then I thought about the eruption of Toba volcano 74,000 years ago, which may have nearly wiped out the human species.  And I thought about the long string of volcanic eruptions, rapid climate swings, tsunamis, droughts, floods, and other geoscience catastrophes that have routinely devastated the human population and prevented any one civilization from lasting very long. Then I thought about the nearly unbelievable changes that we humans were making to our planet, most certainly replacing the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch with the new Anthropocene Epoch. And I wondered how we would know at what point these human impacts would be severe enough to justify replacing the 65-million-year-old Cenozoic Era with a new era, the Anthropozoic Era, the sixth major extinction of life, brought about by the current dominant agent of geologic change on our planet (which is us).

But the smiling commentator who was interviewing me did not want to hear about geologic catastrophes, and I wondered how many viewers would have had the background to understand my answers. Americans get almost no high school education in the areas of Earth and space science. At that moment, the best thing I could talk about was how badly America needed the Next Generation Science Standards, , which are due to be released this spring and whose second public draft was released today. Americans have been duped by too many scams concerning our planet for too long. We need better science education.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are a comprehensive set of K-12 student “performance expectations” for the areas of Earth and space science, life science, and physical science. They integrate concepts of engineering and technology and develop ties to the math and English “Common Core” standards. The NGSS are based on the recommendations of a report by the National Research Council (NRC, the educational arm of the National Academies of Science) called “A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas.” The basis for the NGSS is that all of the performance expectations involve a weaving together of three dimensions – the practices of science, the crosscutting concepts of science, and the core ideas of science. This structure was established and defined in the NRC Framework, and the NGSS are the resulting fleshed-out standards.

Simply put, the NGSS will revolutionize science education for most of the country, at least for the states that choose to adopt them. Though they contain the latest and most up-to-date findings of science, their strength lies in incorporating the latest and most up-to-date advances in pedagogy and educational research. The NGSS move away from presenting science as a list of facts to be memorized and present science as a set of practices to be done. In fact, every grade-appropriate performance expectation, each sentence, ties together a particular science content with a science practice; you cannot pull the content out into a list of factoids.

The aim of NGSS is to identify what students can do, not what they know. After all, if you want to know how many planets there are, you can always look that up on the web. If you want to understand why they are important and how they function as part of a system, the solar system, then there are a set of practices you should do, which the NGSS identify as (1) Asking Questions and Defining Problems, (2) Developing and Using Models, (3) Planning and Carrying Out Investigations, (4) Analyzing and Interpreting Data, (5) Using Mathematics and Computational Thinking, (6) Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions, (7) Engaging in Argument from Evidence, and (8) Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information.

It is well known that most Americans get nearly all their science education after they leave high school. This is less an indictment of the public school educational system than it is an indication of the great fascination that most Americans have with science and the many excellent “informal” educational opportunities available to them. Museums, national and state parks, educational television programs, and digital/print media (such as Scientific American) provide many great opportunities for people to explore the natural world. However, there is still a need for a solid K-12 science education. Schools and textbooks used to be where people got most of their science information. Now that we are flooded with information, we need our formal education more than ever, not to convey more information, but to make sense of it all.

Think of your K-12 science education as constructing a giant bookshelf on which you will organize and make sense of the steady stream of scientific information you will come in contact with during your lifetime. Without that structure, you end up with endless piles of facts, stacked high, that either clutter up your world or eventually get thrown out. (For example, if you Google the word “volcano” you get back almost 100 million websites. How do you make sense of all this?) A good formal science education allows you to organize those facts into sensible concepts that you can build upon if they interest you. And the key is that understanding science enough to construct that conceptual organizational “bookcase” requires you to actively do science, and the labs and data and hands-on opportunities provided in school are the best way to do this. This is what the Next Generation Science Standards are encouraging.

The NGSS provide exciting new opportunities for all the sciences, but most greatly in the areas of Earth and space science. The NGSS standards would require roughly a year of high school Earth and space science. What was the last grade you were in where you received any geoscience education? If you are like most Americans it was in middle school. You might think that there is a sound reason why geology is usually taught in middle school, with little math involved, and not in high school. There isn’t. Though we live in a thoroughly modern scientific world, our science education structure is now 120 years old.

Yes, back in 1893 a group of university professors called the “Committee of Ten,” led by Harvard University president George Eliot, made a set of recommendations to try to standardize the education of incoming university students. Some of the recommendations were excellent, such as promoting hands-on laboratory experimentation and outdoor investigations, but one unfortunate recommendation was that the three years of high school science be of biology, chemistry, and physics, and that “physical geography” be taught in middle school. (Not even any mention of geology.) To be fair, geology wasn’t much at that time; it was mostly a science of categorizing minerals, rocks, fossils, and the relative time sequence of the geologic record. Geologists had no idea why mountains formed or volcanoes erupted. The first seismic recording of an earthquake was made just 4 years earlier. Radioactivity was still a decade away. Milankovitch didn’t figure out that Ice Ages were caused by changes in Earth’s orbit until World War I. The discovery of the mid-ocean ridges wasn’t until after World War II. The pieces of the theory of plate tectonics weren’t assembled until the late 1960’s.

However, some time between 1893 and now, the fields of Earth and space science became a set of quantitative, complex, process-based, systems-oriented, and remarkably relevant scientific practices. Unfortunately, our educational system is still in the mode of teaching “physical geography” in middle school, so this change went largely unnoticed by most Americans, for whom middle school geology meant scratching some minerals and memorizing the geologic time scale. The result of this has been devastating. We became a country with no coherent energy policy because so few people understand the complex issues surrounding both renewable and non-renewable energy sources. We have no national policies toward the limited resources of minerals, soil, and groundwater, as most people don’t even realize these resources are limited. Humans have become the greatest agent of geologic change on the planet, altering the land surface an order of magnitude faster than any other geologic process, but most people have no idea of the impacts of their collective actions. Imagine a toddler who instantly grew to the size of a city and started ravaging the countryside. That’s us.  We have suddenly found ourselves with immense powers, but are still a long way away from having the maturity to know what to do with it or how to control it. Stopgap legislation like the Clean Air Acts and Clean Water Acts, though vitally important, don’t begin to address the enormous impacts our activities are having on Earth’s systems.

The writing of the Next Generation Science Standards is being supervised by Achieve, Inc., which is a bipartisan not-for-profit organization created by a group of governors and corporate leaders in order to carry out K-12 education reform at the state level. However, it is not accurate to say that Achieve is writing the standards. A diverse writing team of almost 50 scientists and educators has been working closely with representatives from 26 participating states as well as many other “critical stakeholder” organizations. The draft of NGSS being released today is only the second public draft, but with all of the reviews by the participating states and critical stakeholders I have lost track of what iteration this is. 6? 7? 8? The point is that it has been very carefully written to be accurate and relevant and useful to states.

It is also important to note that NGSS is entirely apolitical. For the most part, everyone agrees that science, technology, and education are all good things. Everyone wants a better-trained workforce in the areas of engineering and technology. If you look at a map of the 26 states involved with writing the standards, there is lots of both red and blue. For some states, maintaining states’ rights in the area of K-12 education is very important, so it is critical to note that not a penny of federal funding went into constructing either the NRC Framework or the NGSS. Both projects were funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Privately funded and written by states, the NGSS may be national standards, but they are not federal standards.

Let me give you one example of how the NGSS play out in Earth and space science. At the high school level, there are five Earth and space science topics, each one with about a half-dozen performance expectations: Space Systems, History of Earth, Earth’s Systems, Weather and Climate, and Human Sustainability. These build upon similar topics at the middle school level. You can read them all at the Achieve web site (http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards). At the middle school level, the topic of Weather and Climate is focused on weather. At the high school level it is focused on climate change, which can be seen as a capstone high school science experience for all students.

Climate change is not only a critically important topic, it is also one of the most complex topics in all of science, involving cycles within cycles that are a function of radiation physics, atmospheric chemistry, ocean circulation, Milankovitch cycles of solar system orbits, variations in solar output, volcanic eruptions, biosphere dynamics, human activities, and the many complex feedbacks among them. Students need to carry out mathematical analyses of actual data and perform laboratory experiments on Earth materials in order to begin to understand this topic. Students will develop complex systems-based models, construct explanations for cause-and-effect processes, and use engineering concepts to design potential solutions. Not only is this topic unteachable at a middle school level, it needs to be taught following high school physics, chemistry, and biology. However, the result will hopefully be a public that not only ceases to deny the existence of climate change but embraces the topic because of both its relevance and its fascinating intricacies. I think that we can do it. Other countries already have. We also don’t really have a choice. We are still a world leader in science, but no longer a leader in public science education. These two statements are not compatible in the long run.

So, we made it through December 21, 2012, and the world didn’t come to an end. If people had had decent education in Earth and space science, this would not have even been a story. There is no need for us to worry about Mayan prophecies or a rogue planet called Nibiru that might be on a track to hit us. Now, occasionally some large asteroids do hit us; ask the dinosaurs. But it doesn’t happen often, and if people knew that NASA tracks the locations of tens of thousands of objects in space and has the technology to know of any major collision decades in advance, they wouldn’t worry about it.

There is something we should worry about, however: our own ignorance. The Earth science-related challenges facing humanity are enormous. The voting citizenry needs to understand the complexity of these issues so they won’t be duped by over-simplified slogans. Consumers need to understand the implications of their purchases. And everyone needs to know that Earth systems are more delicate than they might think and that the geologic record shows that conditions at Earth’s surface can change in a hurry and often have. Hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy will be replaced by larger ones. As a NOAA scientist recently remarked, when pointing to the fact that the sea level adjacent to New York City is now 13 inches higher than it was a century ago, if you raise a basketball court by 13 inches you will get a lot more slam dunks. As President Abe Lincoln said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present….As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” The adoption by most states of the Next Generation Science Standards is an important step in that direction.

More to explore:

The U.S. Should Adopt Higher Standards for Science Education, Scientific American editorial

Teaching Kids How Raindrops Form, Scientific American blog network

Infinity and Me, by Kate Hosford. Even the littlest children will appreciate this picture book about a girl who asks her friends and family how they imagine infinity.  A friend says it’s like a racetrack shaped like the infinity symbol: cars go around the track forever. Her grandmother says it’s like a family tree that goes on and on. It prompted Eliza to wonder, “What is infinity minus one?” The other night she also pondered a question that comes straight from the book: If you have recess for infinity, is it still recess? (Her answer: No, it’s just playtime.)

Unusual Creatures, by Michael Hearst.  Eliza and I have been reading a few pages of this playful, meticulously illustrated book every night this week, and we both love it.  Hearst profiles some 50 animals, including giant salamanders, strange looking fish, and exotic rodents and marsupials. At times, I’ve wished that the book were more information dense and less eager-to-entertain, as in this sentence: “I really hope at least a few of these unusual creatures make you stop and say, “Whoa, dude! What’s up with that?” But I do appreciate Hearst’s enthusiasm for his subject, which comes through on every page. Like “Infinity and Me,” the book is a terrific conversation starter, and it has made Eliza wonder, for example, why parts of Africa and Australia seem to have many more  ‘unusual creatures’ than the United States. I’m also glad she now knows that Madagascar is more than just a place where talking zoo animals get stranded in movies.

Albert Einstein and Relativity for Kids: His Life and Ideas with 21 Activities and Thought Experiments, by Jerome Pohlen. (Ages 9 and up).  This is a wonderfully accessible biography for children that does not talk down to its young readers. Parents who follow along with them will be reminded of Einstein’s myriad contributions to science and come away with a far clearer understanding of them. Pohlen grounds Einstein’s breakthroughs in the politics of the times, from the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of Jews; to the development of the nuclear bomb, which Einstein at first supported and later regretted; to the formation of Israel, which unsuccessfully tried to recruit Einstein as president. Most importantly, Pohlen clearly delineates Einstein’s breakthroughs – from his understanding of light as a wave and a particle, to his papers on the size of atoms, to special and general relativity.  He also provides simple home experiments to help kids master such concepts as capillary action (the force the pulls a liquid “up” a tube), the speed of light, and gravity’s effect on light.

A Rock is Lively, by Dianna Hutts Aston.  “A rock is lively … bubbling like a pot of soup deep beneath the earth’s crust … liquid … molten … boiling,” writes Aston. Along with illustrator Sylvia Long, Aston brings geology to life, mixing scientific facts (“a rock melts at temperatures between 1,300 and 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit”), with an engaging prose style that covers asteroids, arrowheads and the surprising fact that some animals swallow rocks to help them digest food or to dive more deeply in water. Eliza liked comparing the painted rocks in Aston and Long’s book with the photos in our DK Eyewitness book “Rocks & Minerals.” The two make a great combination.

I wanted to also mention two older books that we returned to this past week and that we have read again and again. If your kids are just learning the planets, “When is a Planet Not a Planet? The Story of Pluto” by Elaine Scott is a great read for kids as well as for parents who attended school long before Pluto’s demotion.  It traces the history of astronomy from the ancient Greeks, who first noticed planets “wandering” from east to west in the night sky against a backdrop of stars (planetes, in Greek, means wanderers), to Pluto’s reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006.

Finally, “Relics: Travels in Nature’s Time Machine,” by the Harvard entomologist Piotr Naskrecki, is not a kids’ book and yet kids will love it. Naskrecki travels the world, camera in hand, documenting known creatures and discovering many new ones. Children will love his tales of adventure in places like New Guinea and the Limpopo province of South Africa as well as his photos of some truly unusual creatures, like a horned frog that looks exactly like a dry leaf, and a katydid (a relative of the grasshopper) that deters predators by spraying them with its blood.  Writes Naskrecki in one of my favorite passages: “I could never quite understand why such a tactic should work – after all, the predator is planning to put the insect, blood and all, in its mouth; why would a little taste of the future meal act as a deterrent? But having been squirted more than once I now understand – a quick squirt startles the predator, which gives the katydid time to arch its back and fully expose its sharp spines.”

PHOTO CREDIT: TOP AND BOTTOM IMAGES BY ANNA KUCHMENT

Phil Handy

An education advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign said last night that a Romney administration would not use federal funds to encourage states to adopt higher standards in math and science.

President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top Program has offered grants to states that adopt certain reforms, including the Common Core State Standards in math and language arts. “The Common Core standards are a very good idea, but they should be opted in by governors and enacted by the states, and both should ultimately be sponsored by the states,” said Phil Handy, higher education co-chair of Romney’s Education Policy Advisory Group. “Economic incentives are not the purview of the federal government.”

Handy, wearing bright orange socks that punctuated his dark suit, spoke at a debate hosted by Teacher’s College, Columbia University and Education Week last night, where he was joined by Jon Schnur, an education advisor to President Barack Obama and co-founder of America Achieves. Susan Fuhrman, president of Teacher’s College, moderated the discussion.

Jon Schnur

Schnur countered that Obama agrees that states should determine their own standards but that the federal government should “provide a supportive role.” “Standards alone don’t drive [change],” he said. “You also need investment.”

The two advisors sparred for 90 minutes over the federal government’s role in education. (Only about 10 percent of K-12 education dollars come from Washington; states cover most of the rest). In the last two years, forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted new Common Core standards, which many hope will lead to revamped curricula that enhance children’s critical thinking abilities and deepen their understanding of math. But standards are just the first step, and schools are now scrambling for the money to purchase new instructional materials that are in line with the standards, to train their teachers accordingly, and to develop new state tests that reflect the new expectations. Race to the Top grants have provided some of this funding.

While the Common Core process is well underway, a new phase of the uniform standards movement is just getting off the ground: the Next Generation Science Standards, which are based on recommendations from scientists at the National Academies.  Proponents of the new science standards, which states may begin adopting as early as next spring, say they are an important first step to improving scientific literacy among American students. Though the new science standards did not come up at the debate, the next president will determine the role of the federal government in helping states implement them.

Handy said  Romney believes the government is responsible for: 1) providing transparency in the form of school data that would help parents make informed decisions about where to send their kids 2) providing funding for underprivileged and special needs kids under Title I and other programs 3) offering  some of that funding in the form of vouchers that would allow parents to choose scho0ls outside their zone.  ”No child should be obligated to go to a certain school because they are born in a certain zip code,” he said. Low performing schools “need some disruption in the system,” he said, “and we believe that choice is part of that disruption.”

Schnur responded that “If you focus only on transparency and choice and walk away from funding, I think choices aren’t meaningful.”

On the stump, Obama has made few references to his administration’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top, but he named it three times last night. Under Race to the Top, the White House has used federal grants to encourage states to adopt tougher reading, writing and math standards, and to encourage them to tie teacher evaluations to students’ test scores. (Read more here about how the Common Core standards will change the way students in Kindergarten through 12^th grade learn math). “What we’ve said is to states, we’ll give you more money if you initiate reforms. And as a consequence, you had 46 states around the country who have made a real difference,” he said last night, referred to the 46 states who have adopted the Common Core.

In the past, Romney’s advisors have criticized Race to the Top’s role in promoting the Common Core, saying the federal government was playing too big a role in decisions that are better left to states. But last night Romney went on the record praising Race to the Top. “The primary responsibility for education is, of course, at the state and local level,” he said. “But the federal government also can play a very important role. And I agree with Secretary [of Education] Arne Duncan — some ideas he’s put forward on Race to the Top, not all of them, but some of them I agree with and congratulate him for pursuing that. The federal government can get local and state schools to do a better job.”

The quote surprised Kathleen Porter-Magee, a Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy think thank.”Obviously, a lot of conservatives are really worried about federal overreach in forcing states to adopt the Common Core,” she says. ”So, I found it interesting how much praise Romney gave Obama for his Race to the Top program. I think it shows, as polarized as the debate over education reform has become, there are a lot of areas where both sides agree.”

Even with the praise, Romney’s answer leaves open the question of how much support he, as president, would give to states as they implement the common core standards by the 2014 deadline. Facing a budget crunch, school districts are scrambling for the resources to buy new curricula and prepare teachers for the changes. And neither he nor Obama addressed the forthcoming Next Generation Science Standards, which aim to do for K to 12  science, technology and engineering education what the Common Core did for math and language arts. States will have to decide next year whether or not to adopt them. What role, if any, will the federal government play in encouraging states to sign on?

Another potential area of agreement was on the role businesses should play in helping community colleges train workers for high tech jobs. In his 2012 budget, Obama requested $8 billion for a Community College to Career Fund to train 2 million workers in fields such as healthcare and advanced manufacturing.  The initiative is aimed at addressing the shortage of workers in high-paying science and technology fields. Across the country, there are nearly twice as many job openings in these fields as qualified workers looking to fill them. “When it comes to community colleges, we are seeing great work done out there all over the country because we have the opportunity to train people for jobs that exist right now,” said Obama. “And one of the things I suspect Governor Romney and I probably agree on is getting businesses to work with community colleges so that they’re setting up their training programs …and people who are going through them know that there’s a job waiting for them if they complete it. That makes a big difference, but that requires some federal support.”

Obama also mentioned his goal of training 100,000 new math and science teachers within the next decade to address a critical shortage of teachers with bachelor’s degrees in those subjects. The 100,000 figure first came up in a September, 2010 report to the president by his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which estimated the training would cost $100 to $150 million per year. While Obama didn’t specify where the money for that program would come from, a group of private companies and philanthropic organizations known as 100Kin10 has embraced the cause.

IMAGES: Left, official White House photo by Pete Souza. Right, photo by Terence Burlij/PBS NewsHour via flickr.

More to Explore:

“Common Core State Standards Dividing the GOP,” from Education Week.

“Why Math Teachers Feel Poorly Prepared,” from Scientific American.

Guest post by Michael R. Duffey

There is a wide variety of creative projects which can help introduce children to the world of microcontrollers.  A microcontroller is simply a small computer that can interact with the outside world.  It can connect different types of “inputs” (such as sensing a motion, force, or temperature change) to “outputs” (turn on a light, start a motor, make a sound).  Microcontrollers are not just the brains of robots, in the rather quaint way that most of us still think of walking/talking robotic creatures.  Microcontrollers are embedded everywhere in household appliances, cars, and children’s toys.  When your child squeezes a battery powered doll to make it talk?   Microcontroller.  When you make coffee in that fancy new coffee maker or control the temperature on your new household thermostat?  Microcontroller.   With some simple projects, children can take a first step toward understanding the basic hardware and software concepts that underlie so much of the technology they encounter in their daily lives.  For parents who find modern gizmos mysterious (and, let’s face it, sometimes intimidating!) these introductory projects can be insightful as well.

There are several children’s toy-building environments that utilize programmable microcontrollers (such as Lego Mindstorms or Fischertechnik). There are also do-it-yourself microcontroller systems used for years by hobbyists and tech-savvy kids (such as the BASIC Stamp kits available at Radio Shack stores).

But the type of microcontroller that is gaining favor rapidly for creative older children’s projects is known as an “arduino.”  An arduino microcontroller is based on an “open source” (non-commercial, publicly-licensed) design, and many small companies have sprung up recently to fabricate arduinos and related step-by-step project kits and accessories.  Free software for programming arduinos is available for most laptop computers, which then connect to the arduino to download programs.  The  “Make” community (organizer of the wildly popular “Maker Faire” events, and the online Makezine) has embraced arduinos, and their web page is probably as good a place to start as any (blog.makezine.com/arduino).  For girls who might appreciate a very cool, geeky female role model in this traditionally male domain, check out Lady Ada. Lady Ada (a/k/a Limor Fried) is a recent MIT masters graduate who started her own company selling arduino-related kits with easy-to-follow online instructions.

The first introductory project everyone does with an arduino is called “Blink.”  There are step-by-step instructions for Blink from many different online sources.  It involves programming a microcontroller to simply blink an LED (light emitting diode) on and off.  The book “Getting Started with Arduino” is a good entry point.  Starting with the Blink example, one can incrementally move up to more complex projects with small motors, lights and various types of sensors.  The book and accompanying beginner’s kits are available from many sources such as Sparkfun.  Blinking jewelry and clothing, talking teddy bears, halloween robot monsters…..you’ll find all sorts of creative applications via Make and other websites, including help forums and step-by-step youtube videos.  Be forewarned, however, that tinkering with arduinos takes patience as you learn to navigate thru the minor troubleshooting issues that arise.  Like much of engineering, there’s nothing terribly forbidding here as long as you tackle the little problems incrementally and cultivate your own innate common sense.  Just the right type of challenge for the budding engineer!

IMAGES: Top: Hexy the hexapod, from Arcbotics. Bottom: ”First Arduino Project,” by Road Fun, via Flickr

Michael R. Duffey is associate professor of engineering management and systems engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), George Washington University. Duffey is interested in how physical engineering systems are economically designed, built, and operated. Along with many other SEAS faculty, he is working on new ways to attract young people to engineering and related curriculum in SEAS undergraduate programs.

Our pet Monarch caterpillar

Two weeks ago, I set out in search of milkweed hoping to find an egg laid by a Monarch butterfly. With no previous egg-hunting experience, I was armed only with what I had read in the terrific book “My Monarch Journal” by Connie Muther and Anita Bibeau.  The book gives step-by-step instructions, accompanied by detailed, close-up photos, of how to raise a Monarch butterfly whether from a kit or from nature. It also includes space on nearly every page for children to write or sketch their own observations about the butterfly’s life cycle.

I came home from my expedition with what looked like a wart on a leaf. I was only 50 percent sure that what I had was in fact a Monarch egg, but we decided to watch and wait. Among a Monarch egg’s distinguishing features are tiny vertical ribs. At first I couldn’t see them, but then my daughter spotted them by holding the egg at just the right angle while looking through a magnifying glass.

Since then, we’ve gotten to see the egg hatch, a green, barely visible, wiggly speck emerge and grow with shocking speed into a fat, yellow, black and white-striped caterpillar.

The rearing process can be a little nerve-wracking. Monarch caterpillars, unlike Tussock Moth caterpillars, which we have also raised, eat only milkweed, and there’s no milkweed near our house.  I drive to a nearby patch each week and cut fresh stalks that I keep in a vase of water. We give our caterpillar a fresh leaf just about every day and clean out its ever-larger amounts of poop, known in the caterpillar world as frass. Once the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, we plan to tag and release it to help researchers track the annual Monarch migration from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico and back.

For more details on Monarch rearing, visit the Monarch Watch Web site.

In October, look out for the IMAX documentary “Flight of the Butterflies,” which follows the Monarch migration in 3D and tells the story of zoologist and Monarch Watch founder Fred Urquhart.

A Hickory Tussock Moth caterpillar (the black and white one) with a Banded Tussock Moth caterpillar above it.

Last week, my parents’ yard in Western Massachusetts was overrun with fuzzy black and white creatures known as Hickory Tussock Moth caterpillars (Lophocampa caryae).  Just after a rainstorm, I noticed that the caterpillars were hanging from trees like spiders, lowering themselves from branches on lines of silk (see video below; apologies for the commentary in the background).

Everywhere I walked that day I saw caterpillars hanging from leaves like ornaments. Jeffrey Miller, a Lepidoptera expert at Oregon State University, explains that caterpillars use silk as a lifeline all the time, not just when spinning cocoons. “They spin silk from a gland built into their multiple mouthpart bits. They use silk as a place (pad) to molt, when they are disturbed by wind,  when threatened by a predator, and when – those that must – lower themselves to the ground and look for a place to make their pupa,” he says.

Last year, my daughter and I collected two Tussock Moth caterpillars and watched them weave cocoons inside pickle jars. (Note: the hairs on these caterpillars are allergenic to some and may cause an itchy rash. We rarely touch our caterpillars directly and transfer them into and out of containers using small twigs or leaf stems). This year, with the dry weather keeping fungal diseases at bay, the caterpillar population has exploded, and my daughter caught a dozen, which we’re raising in five separate containers. That’s a lot of work! We feed them fresh leaves and clean out their frass (poop) every day. But it’s fun and rewarding to watch them grow and eventually transform into moths.

For details on how to raise caterpillars, see my earlier posts here, here and here.

Brittany Wenger

This year’s Google Science Fair winner, Brittany Wenger, 17, from Sarasota, Florida, spent more than 600 hours coding a sophisticated computer program to help doctors detect breast cancer using a less invasive form of biopsy. I spoke to her this morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

How did you feel when you heard you had won not only your age category but also the grand prize at Monday night’s awards ceremony?

I was just so excited. It was a very surreal experience walking up there. I don’t even know how I got up there.

Tell me about your project.

I taught the computer how to diagnose breast cancer so it could determine whether a breast mass is malignant or benign. I did this because currently the least invasive form of biopsy is actually the least conclusive. So a lot of doctors can’t use it.

I created an artificial neural network, which is a type of program that learns based on its experiences and mistakes, so it classifies problems that are far too complex for humans to classify. Then I fed information into the neural network from a database of fine needle aspirates, the least invasive form of biopsy.

Currently the network is working really well. It is 99.1 percent sensitive to malignancies, and I ran 7.6 million trials and proved that, as I get more data, the success rate increases and the inconclusivity rate decreases, so I think with more data it will prove to be hospital ready.

What inspired your project?

I started in the 7^th grade. In school we were researching the future, and my part of the future that I was researching was future technologies.  I grew fascinated by artificial intelligence, which I came across. I went home that night, and I bought a computer programming book and, with no experience, decided that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

Computer science is one area where the gender gap has not yet closed: men still outnumber women by a wide margin. Why do you think that’s the case?

I think sometimes there’s a stereotype around computer science, that it’s just video game development, and more boys are hard core game developers than girls. But you have to realize it’s our Web sites, our Google tools, it’s our Facebook, and I think that you could reach girls more if you could appeal to what they’re using computer science for.

But also I think we’ve come a long way. More girls are getting interested in science, and I know it used to be that girls weren’t encouraged, but I’ve never felt like I couldn’t go into science, like I was being discriminated against because I was a girl.

Do you remember what first sparked your interest in science more generally?

I always say that science is a passion that found me, instead of a passion that I chose. When I was little my brother was really sick with a lung condition he later outgrew, and we were in the hospital at all hours during his first few years. I really grew to idolize the men and women in scrubs and got a taste of what science could do to change the world. But along the way I had a 6^th grade science teacher who was just amazing, her passion was so contagious, her name was Karen Malesky, and I’ve been blessed with amazing science experiences. It’s always been hands-on, and I really like that aspect.

Have you decided what career path you’d like to pursue?

I want to be on the frontier of cancer research, finding the cures that are going to save lives and doing things with computer science that can be the technologies of the future. I also want to be a pediatric oncologist, so I hope to intertwine my  passions for research, computer science and patient care in the future.

Many of my readers are parents with science-interested kids. Do you have any advice for them on how to help foster their children’s interest?

Science is so broad, so let your kid follow their passion.  My first artificial neural network had to do with soccer. I’m an avid soccer player. I taught the computer when it should pass, when it should dribble; it was a mini soccer game, two on two. When you’re passionate about something you’ll be persistent and really enjoy it.

What are the next steps for your project?

It will take a long time, but I hope to scale it up and bring it into hospitals. I put my neural network into the cloud, because the cloud is this amazing, elastic entity that allows for a million hospitals to access it tomorrow if they want and to provide feedback. I’m so happy to have won the Google Science Fair, because it will give me a new platform to help bring my project to physicians, and people will take me more seriously.

*************************UPDATE**********************

In March 2013, Brittany finished 8th and won $20,000 in the annual Intel Science Talent Search. I asked her what it was like to take top honors in both competitions and how her project has developed since last summer.

How does it feel to be a winner at Intel and at Google?

Being a winner at Google and Intel is very surreal. Having top scientists from both competitions recognize me as a top competitor provides me with an amazing affirmation about my STEM future. It is also exciting because both competitions assess different elements. Google was very driven by my research where as Intel STS focused on evaluating my potential as a scientist. At Google, I presented my research and was questioned on that. At Intel, questions could range from “Evolutionarily speaking, could dragons exist?” to more concrete questions about complex science concepts.

Did you change anything about your project since Google?

The Google Science Fair has given me a platform to share my research with the world. Since the Google Science Fair, I have been collecting more data to improve my breast cancer program. So far, the network has diagnosed 100% of the additional samples correctly, and the exciting part about collecting more samples is not only am I validating my research, but also through 7.6 million trials I’ve proven that these additional samples will also improve the accuracy of my program. Since my program learns based on experience, the more experience, the better. In addition, I have built a REST (representational state transfer) service so that an institute in Italy can test the program against 400 dubious samples. [REST is a program that facilitates transactions between Web servers].

In addition, I extended my research to diagnose MLL leukemia samples from genetic expression profiles. A hybrid neural network is 100% accurate and was also able to identify four genetic expressions that are particularly important in the decision. These regions may be places for drug companies to target since MLL is an aggressive form of leukemia with no good treatment option.

Because leukemia and breast cancer are so different (leukemia is a blood cancer with 12,582 genetic expressions as inputs where as breast cancer deals with masses and 9 cytological inputs), I am hopeful that my neural network technique will be applicable to all types of cancer diagnostics.

Any other updates on your project — have you gotten any doctors or hospitals to start using it, are you going to write up the research for publication?

I have started working with Lankenau Medical Center and an Institute in Italy (see above). I also aspire to get my research published.

Have your career goals changed since your GSF win and your internship?

This year has been amazing! It has confirmed my desire to pursue a computer science degree along with a biology degree, and I still want to become a pediatric oncologist. Most likely, I would like to earn an Md-PhD since I want to be able to contribute to a team that is working to find the cures to cancers. However, I would at some point love to work/intern for Google since I have found it to be an amazing company.

I think overall this year has shown me how many people care about me and my research, and how much support is out there if I just ask.

Finalists and winners of the 2012 Google Science Fair. Foreground: Vint Cerf and Shree Bose (2011 winner)

An expectant crowd gathered last night inside an airplane hangar at a flight school in Palo Alto, California to hear the winners of the second annual Google Science Fair. The grand prize went to Brittany Wenger, 17, of Sarasota, Florida, who wrote a computer program to help doctors diagnose breast cancer less invasively.  Jonah Kohn, 14, of San Diego, Calif. won his age category for creating a device that converts sound into tactile vibration to improve the music-listening experience for the hearing impaired; and a trio from Spain won the 15 to 16 age category for documenting the hazardous and non-hazardous organisms found in water from different parts of their country.

Brittany Wenger

“The whole judging panel came away with a big ‘wow,’” said the technologist Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, of Wenger’s project. Wenger, whose prize includes $50,000, a trip to the Galapagos Islands, one year of mentoring and internship opportunities, wrote a computer program known as a neural network to help detect patterns in a large database of breast tissue samples. Traditional biopsies of the breast are painful, but a less invasive type of biopsy known as a fine needle aspirate (FNA) is also less conclusive. Wenger’s program, which she put through an incredible 7.6 million trials to test it for accuracy, helps doctors successfully detect more than 99 percent of malignant tumors using FNA.

Wenger first developed a passion for science as a small child, when she got to know the doctors caring for her younger brother who suffered from a lung condition. “I really grew to idolize the men and women in scrubs and got a taste of what science could do to change the world,” she said. In 6^th grade, she had an “amazing” science teacher who encouraged her to pursue projects of her own. “She instilled in Brittany the scientific method … and encouraged her to participate in competitions,” says Brittany’s father, Jeff Wenger.

Kohn came up with the idea for his project in what may be one of the oddest Eureka! moments ever: biting the head of his guitar.  Showing a friend some guitar licks one day in a noisy classroom at school, he and his friend discovered they could hear the music much better if they put their teeth on the guitar.  Kohn decided to apply this discovery to a project aimed at helping the hearing impaired enjoy music. Using a phenomenon known as tactile sound, Kohn designed a device that filters sound into frequency ranges applied to different body parts. His device improved the listening experience of young people with cochlear implants by more than 95 percent. Cerf was struck by something Kohn said at the end of his presentation to the judges: that tactile sound could have an impact beyond music to illuminate how we perceive language. “I suddenly realized that there are lots of different means by which we understand things, and there is not just a single medium, it’s not just voice: but it’s what we see, what we hear and now possibly what we feel.  I wanted to just stop everything and go back to school.”

Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascual

In the 15 to 16 age category, Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascual of Logroño, Spain studied what they called “The Secret Life of Water.” They documented the microbes and hazardous substances in fresh water, studied how those organisms influence the environment, and mapped their presence across Spain. “They went back to a very ancient tradition in natural sciences, which is sampling the real world, cataloguing what you find, and then analyzing it to try to interpret what the implications are,” says Cerf.

Top photo: Anna Kuchment

Lower three portraits: Andrew Federman Photography

Titus Mandla Sithole

This year, Scientific American funded the first Science in Action award, a $50,000 prize as part of the Google Science Fair. The prize also includes a year of mentoring to advance the work. The 14-year-old winners, Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Malalela, developed a simplified system for hydroponics, which increased crop yields by 140 percent. Their system uses 90 percent waste materials, including old cardboard boxes, sawdust and chicken manure. Their teacher, Titus Mandla Sithole, introduced the Google Science Fair to the classroom earlier this year, and then supported his young charges in developing their project. We asked him about his experiences via email just before he left for the Google Science Fair awards ceremony, which takes place on Monday night.

Tell us a little about your background. How did you become a teacher?

I am Titus Mandla Sithole, 32 years old. I am a teacher at Lusoti High School. I have been teaching here for years, i.e. since I graduated at William Pitcher Teacher Training Colleague, where I obtained a Diploma in Education majoring in Science and Mathematics. I am currently enrolled with UNISA [University of South Africa] pursuing my Bachelor’s degree in Education (Mathematics and Computer Science).

Please tell us about your school and your community.

Lusoti High School is a government school on company grounds. It is within Lusoti village, which is owned by the Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation. About 50 percent of the learners stay within the village, whereas the other 50 percent commutes to the school. Lusoti is in the Lowveld of Swaziland in a small town called Simunye. The main activity at Simunye is sugar production. Most of the learners who stay within the village are children of company employees. The learners at our school are around 350 ranging, from 12 years to 22 years.  Lessons at the school begin at 07:30 everyday up to 16:00 [4 p.m.].  There is a 20 minutes tea break at 10:00 and an hour’s lunch break at 13:00 [1 p.m.]. On Wednesdays, however, lessons run up to lunchtime and sports commence after lunch up to 16:00.The school has classes from form one to form five.  Each class has two streams, meaning there are 10 streams in the schools.

How did you learn about the Google Science Fair and how did you introduce it to the class?

I was on YouTube in December 2011—not sure of the date—and there was this advert about YouTube Space Lab competition. I clicked there to find out what is all about then found a link to Google Science Fair 2011 Video. I watched the video and then searched more about the GSF from the net. I was very interested in it, as I spent most of my free time learning more from the links in that site and that where I met Scientific American, LEGO and CERN for the first time. I knew about the National Geographic Channel. Today I am a big fan of CERN and Scientific American. And I visit their sites almost every day.

In January, just on the first day of school, I used the PowerPoint presentation GSF prepared for educators to introduce GSF in class. However, I edited it to suit my classes, then encouraged the learners in class to study concepts beyond what they learn in class, in order to be able to conceive project ideas. The majority of the learners said they cannot take part, because working on a project demands a lot of hard work yet they have to do assignments on many subjects on a daily basis. Four projects (teams) come up all from the Junior Classes. But only one, Sakhiwe’s and Bonkhe’s, manage to be completed and submitted before deadline.

Two of the four groups are currently working towards the GSF 2013 are already giving me a lot of pressure in checking their projects. In addition, 50 percent of the school population have come to me once or twice asking if could I help them in their projects—most of which do not even exist yet.

We understand Sakhiwe and Bonkhe were most interested. How did you work with them on their project?

Sakhiwe came with their project concept drafted on paper and sought school facilities and resources to help them work out their project. They needed to use the school’s computers, Internet connection, school’s premises for producing crops, as well as for its safety, as they would work through the night sometimes especially during their project site creation. I had to ensure that they access all the resources they needed from the school and were also safe when working at night by always availing myself when they needed me.

They are good, and what I liked most about them is that I never pushed them to submit anything to me for checking. Instead, they were always pushing and pushing me almost every day, and telling me that they are going to California. To ensure that their ideas are communicated in a clear and simple manner, I ensured that I did read all items they typed before they put them into their Web site.

It’s exciting to work or assist pupils which are self-motivated and knew what they are doing. Being the only group out of four to submit before deadline on its own showed their commitment.

How do you think other teachers can inspire students about science?

Teachers have to emphasize the role of science in improving the lives of human beings on a day to day basis. They must encourage learners to relate every science lesson directly to their life encounters, whether at home, school or community at large. Teachers should use projects as one of the methods of teaching and learning in science. And competition of this nature (GSF) reallygive us teachers a challenge. It is up to teachers to expose their pupils, regardless of backgrounds, and have faith in them.

How can teachers support science-fair projects? What steps should they take?

Teachers must run science fair competitions beginning from the classroom level, where they can get experience winning projects and can then go on to the school level. After eliminations at the school levels, winning projects may then go on to the national or international level, such as GSF. Teachers should be role models, by asking questions themselves so as to encourage curiosity among learners. And cultivating curiosity at the class level will encourage students to study science as they try to solve everyday challenges affecting their lives.

Do you have any other advice for science teachers?

They need to keep on learning themselves, and to keep pace with new discoveries and inventions in order to be able to understand and help judge the learners’ projects. Never stop studying. Never stop asking questions.

Anything else you want to add?

Most improvements in the lives of human beings have come about through science. Science is behind the industrial and the agricultural revolution and advances in medical care. Even at the present time, we are looking to science to bring about solutions to many pressing issues—among which is reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and acidic gases. Science projects serve as a pathway to conceptions that bring solutions to issues of major concern.

T.H. Culhane

On Monday Google will announce the winners of its second annual Google Science Fair. As SA did last year, we’ve partnered with Google on the competition, and editor in chief Mariette DiChristina serves as a judge. This year, SA helped expand the honors by sponsoring the Science In Action award for a project that addresses a social, environmental or health issue to make a practical difference in the lives of a group or community. We announced the winners – Bonkhe Mahlalela and Sakhiwe Shongwe, 14, of Swaziland – last month, and they will be attending next week’s awards in Mountain View, Calif., where they are eligible for more honors. And I’ll be covering the ceremony and the events leading up to it on this blog.

To help provide some context, I wanted to share a post by T. H. Culhane, a science educator and Google Science Fair judge.  He reflects on the pain of choosing just a handful of winners from among a highly gifted group of finalists and proposes a way of rewarding more of these talented young people.

Guest post by T.H. Culhane, excerpted from a longer essay that can be found here.

I [recently] had the honor to judge the work of 15 dedicated young men and women whose brilliant applications of their native curiosity and formal science education  had led  to them becoming finalists in the first Scientific American “Science in Action” awards competition, and it was quite a moving experience, given their universal sincerity in helping their fellow humans — particularly those less fortunate than them — to lead  dignified, meaningful, healthy and environmentally sustainable lives.

It was a joy to think through these remarkable young people’s projects through this process; at the same time it was very very difficult (often painfully so) to think that my judgements as a science educator/mentor could actually stand between a young person and their dreams of improving their world, for every time we select a “winner” we also are aware that in this go-round we will be unable to support the work of the other nominees. And I often ask myself, when it comes to solving our biggest environmental and health challenges, how many rounds do we get? Isn’t there some way to put the great science all these kids are doing into action now?

16 year old Catherine Wong pointed out in her proposal, “Engineering is applied dreaming.” Her call to action — “here’s to daring to dream!”–  puts a lump in my throat every time I read it.  Similarly, 14 year olds Sakhiwe and Bonkhe moved me beyond measure with their astute observation that “Winning Google Science Fair as young Swazi scientists cannot change the world; however can change the way we live in it.  Given the opportunity the project can make Swaziland a better country to live in.”  If that isn’t the strongest statement of the pragmatic dreamer, who realizes the true limitations of all our best intentions, yet still  knows what the right application of intelligence and resources can do to improve local conditions, I don’t know what is! What this process made me do is come up with a fantasy for a possible “Science in Action Summer Camp”. This would be a science in action prize which, rather than selecting a winner from among the group, would function to bring together ALL the contestants to synergize their contributions in a results oriented cooperative rather than competitive forum.

As a science educator I’ve learned that some parameters that lead to ultimate success in the implementation of a great idea are notoriously difficult to measure or evaluate.  We as teachers often can only vaguely feel when our judgements and actions can provide that incredibly valuable spark that can cause the waiting tinder of a child’s mind to burst into the passionate flame of understanding and activity; often we inadvertently snuff out  a glimmer of promise whose consequences could have major positive impacts if we could only have known where and how to nudge things toward to light.

So I keep thinking of ways to make everyone a winner. Now, as I look at the incredible crop of young people we’ve just been judging for Science in Action, I’d like to propose a fantasy for how further support might be given to them and students like them in the future.

Along with (or instead of?) a grand prize winner getting $50,000 dollars for their particular work, $50,000 could be made available, as the Blackstone Ranch has done, for the creation of a synergistic team that can put their ideas together to create a “best practice model” somewhere in the world (a showcase in Swaziland? a gaggle of ideas on display at Google? A eutopia trial baloon in Ethiopia or Uruguay?)

We “judges” and the institutions sponsoring the initiative would be acting like “The Wizard of Oz” when, at the end of the MGM film, at the wish granting ceremony, he points out to Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion that they already have almost everything they need to achieve their goals, but are often merely missing one or two catalysts to enable their best qualities to shine through and work to their greatest effect.  We would point out that the missing catalysts can often be found in the toolkits of the other finalists.  As in the Blackstone Ranch Emerging Explorer Innovation Challenge  that would be the challenge — identifying and putting those missing pieces together.

Finalist Sumit Singh of India wrote this poem to the Science in Action committee regarding people in need around the world:

“I sense their pain and apprehend their affliction,

Their hardships and their grievous soul,

I resolve to bring a change in their condition,

And choose their happiness as my goal.”

Any would-be superhero who chooses to tackle such hardships will face the prospect of severe disillusionment when trying to go it alone. But, as the recent Marvel “The Avengers” film shows these young people, when people with different talents and abilities come together with common purpose and pool their energies, there is nothing they can’t overcome.

For T.H.’s full post, click here.

When William Schmidt, an expert on math education at Michigan State University, moved his family from East Lansing to Charlottesville, Virginia for a year’s research leave, his work took a personal turn.  He noticed that the public school his daughters would be attending outside Charlottesville was academically behind the one they had attended in Michigan. Back home, his 2^nd grade daughter would be learning multiplication tables up through the number 5, yet in Charlottesville, multiplication was not even part of his local school’s second grade curriculum.

His daughter’s experience, he explains in a new book excerpted below, is not unique. “ The [American] system of schooling represents a game of chance that few are even aware is being played,” he writes in “Inequality for All: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunity in American Schools,” co- written with Curtis C. McKnight. The inequalities pose a risk to every child, they write, regardless of socioeconomic background or race. They stem from differences in state education standards, in school funding, in curricula that districts choose to adopt and in the content that individual classroom teachers choose to teach.  In this excerpt, Schmidt and McKnight focus on variations in how math teachers are trained and how that, in turn, affects student achievement.

The following is excerpted from Inequality for All: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunity in American Schools, by William H. Schmidt and Curtis C. McKnight. (Teachers College Press, 2012).

One thing that most of us remember best about school is our teachers. Thus, when solutions are proposed for reforming American schools in response to critical reports or disappointing test results, teachers are always among the first to be singled out. Proposals often turn first to improving the teaching force by focusing on higher quality. For example, in the NCLB [No Child Left Behind] era, considerable emphasis has been placed on a “highly qualified” teaching force.

Districts must certify what percentage of their teachers is highly qualified. However, the states and school districts define what they consider “highly qualified,” resulting in a great deal of ambiguity.

What does it mean to be a highly qualified teacher? The definition of a high-quality mathematics teacher has never been standardized. Therefore, although improving the quality of teachers and teaching is a common cry when we seek to improve schools, there is little agreement and scant empirical evidence that indicates what characteristics define a high-quality mathematics teacher. Even an obvious definition, such as a knowledge of mathematics, is problematic, since there is generally no agreement as to what specific mathematics knowledge is needed.

The literature identifies two types of knowledge that are clearly related to providing opportunities to learn: mathematics content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. For mathematics, recent empirical work has advanced our understanding of what mathematics knowledge is necessary for teaching mathematics. The rest of this chapter lays out how this knowledge—in particular, mathematics content knowledge—is related to inequalities in content coverage, and provides data related to teacher content knowledge for a sample of teachers.

What Teachers Tell Us About Their Knowledge of Mathematics

We approached the question of teacher knowledge of specific mathematics content indirectly, by asking a sample of more than 4,000 teachers from the PROM/SE project [Promoting Rigorous Outcomes in Math and Science Education] to respond to the question, “How well prepared academically do you feel you are—that is, you feel you have the necessary disciplinary coursework and understanding—to teach each of the following?” We asked this question for multiple mathematics topics. The list of topics varied for teachers in primary and teachers in middle and secondary school combined.

By relying on teachers’ reports of their own feelings of adequate preparation, we only get at their knowledge indirectly. Fortunately, this approach is sufficient to demonstrate how much variation there is in teachers’ content-specific knowledge, or at least in their feelings of adequate preparation. Furthermore, the candor of the results suggests a degree of face validity and, hence, integrity in the responses. The overall tenor of the responses is very consistent with other data on the issue, some of which suggest that the pattern reported here might be a best-case scenario. All results reported in this chapter are based on the PROM/SE data.

Primary Teachers (1st Through 3rd Grades)

Primary teachers felt academically prepared to teach only the topics they taught to their students. Even for those topics, about one-fourth to one-half of the teachers surveyed reported that they did not feel well prepared. The teachers we surveyed were from 60 PROM/SE districts located in Michigan and Ohio.

Is it reasonable for teachers to focus only on the topics that they will teach? However reasonable such a position may appear, many of the more advanced topics for which teachers did not feel well prepared provide the mathematics background necessary to be truly well prepared to teach the more elementary topics at their grade level. To define a qualified teaching force, we adopted a criterion of 75% of teachers feeling well prepared to teach a given topic. We found that, over all sampled teachers, only two mathematics topics met this criterion: the meaning of whole numbers, including place value and operations with whole numbers.

Virtually all of the geometry topics (aside from the basics) are excluded by the 75% criterion. So are all of the proportionality topics and all of the algebra topics. These results imply that the quality of learning opportunities surrounding many of the mathematics topics taught in 1st through 3rd grades was not likely to be high. They also suggest that there is large variability in self-reported content-specific knowledge. For many of these topics, only a bare majority of 50% to 60% of teachers felt well prepared.

The other striking feature of the results was the large variability across districts. For example, for fractions, in some districts all of the primary teachers felt very well prepared, while in other districts only about half of the teachers felt very well prepared. For geometry basics (lines, angles, and so on), the results ranged from one district with only about one-fourth of its teachers feeling well prepared to another district in which about 90% of the teachers felt well prepared.

Upper Elementary Teachers (4th Through 5th Grades)

The results for districts for 4th- and 5th-grade teachers were quite different. For example, for eight different topics, all of the teachers in at least one district felt very well prepared academically for each of those topics.

At the district level, the results for whole number meaning and operations were similar to those for 1st- through 3rd-grade teachers. Further, fractions also had a median value around 75%.

However, the variability across districts remains a striking feature for 4th- and 5th-grade teachers, particularly for decimals, percentages, and geometry basics. These are all topics that were supposed to be introduced in these grades in Michigan and Ohio. For example, for decimals, in one district only one-fourth of the teachers felt well prepared, while in another district virtually all teachers indicated that they felt well prepared to teach decimals.

Middle School Teachers (6th Through 8th Grades)

We examined the pool of teachers from all of the districts taken together. From this perspective, there were no topics that at least 75% of the teachers felt very well prepared to teach. Only two topics came close. Among the whole pool of teachers, 73% indicated that they felt well prepared to teach the topic of coordinates and lines. Sixty-nine percent of the teachers indicated that they felt well prepared to teach the topic of data.

Eleven topics qualify if we relax the criterion to topics in which at least 50% of the teachers felt well prepared. This included the two topics just mentioned as well as nine others—negative, rational, and real numbers; exponents, roots, and radicals; number theory; polygons and circles; congruence and similarity; proportionality problems; patterns and relations; expressions and simple equations; and linear equalities and inequalities. The Michigan and Ohio standards call for including many of these topics at the middle grades. The fact that only about 50% to 60% of the teachers felt very well prepared to teach these topics suggested something of the magnitude of the problem that school districts face.

For example, there has been a strong national movement to include elementary algebra topics in the middle school, particularly in 8th grade. The Michigan and Ohio standards reflect this, as do the Common Core State Standards, which are in the process of becoming the new Michigan and Ohio state standards. Adoption of the Common Core State Standards brings states more into alignment with international benchmarks of what is expected in the equivalent of middle school.

The severity of the problems faced by these districts and, by inference, by the United States as a whole, was indicated by the fact that only about half of the teachers felt academically very well prepared to teach expressions and simple equations, as well as linear equalities and inequalities. Even fewer teachers (only around 25% to 40%) felt they had adequate content knowledge to teach other important algebraic concepts, including proportionality (41% of teachers), slope (38%), and functions (39%).

High School Teachers

The story for high school teachers is rather different, which is not unexpected given their typically greater preparation in mathematics. Almost 60% of the topics met the criterion of having at least 75% of the pool of PROM/SE teachers from the 60 districts indicating that they were well prepared academically. The areas in which high school teachers indicated that they felt less well prepared were number bases, three-dimensional geometry, geometric transformations, logarithmic and trigonometric functions, probability, and calculus. These findings are, however, still cause for concern. For example, there is an increasingly strong push for the inclusion of probability and statistics in high school, as is found in the Common Core State Standards, yet less than half of the surveyed mathematics teachers felt well prepared to teach it. Teachers’ self-perceptions of their preparedness seem likely, if anything, to overestimate what they know and how well prepared they are rather than to underestimate it.

Moving from the pool of all 60 districts to the district-by-district results for a large number of topics (16), at least 25% of the districts had all of their high school teachers indicating that they felt well prepared to teach those topics. However, there was still great variation across the districts, especially for geometry topics including transformations, three-dimensional geometry, polygons, and circles. There was similarly great variability in the percentage of teachers who felt that they had the coursework to make them well prepared to deal with calculus, probability, number theory, and logarithmic and trigonometric functions.

Why Teachers Feel So Poorly Prepared

We have surveyed how well prepared in terms of disciplinary course work teachers at various levels felt for teaching various mathematics topics in what is a fairly representative sample of 60 districts. In general, we would summarize the findings by stating that many teachers felt ill prepared to teach mathematics topics that are in state standards and in the new Common Core State Standards for mathematics. Why did these teachers feel so ill prepared?

There is perhaps a simple answer for the elementary and middle school teachers: They felt ill prepared because if we examine the coursework they studied during their teacher preparation, they were ill prepared. The new TEDS study results suggested this to be the case more generally, which clearly does not bode well for equality of learning experiences for students in these districts.

College-Level Preparation

In this section, we summarize what teachers have told us about their preparation in mathematics at the college level and as graduate students.

In 1st through 4th grades, less than 10% have either a major or a minor in mathematics.  Teachers at this level are typically generalists—they must be prepared to teach many different subject-matter areas. They do not have adequate time in their preparation to get a major or a minor in each of those subject matters.

At 4th grade, the international data paint a different picture. Unfortunately, the definitions are not precisely the same, but the data do provide us with a benchmark of sorts. Including those primary teachers with either a mathematics major or a minor in mathematics or science, around one-third of 4th-grade students on average had such a teacher in the countries that took part in TIMSS, [the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study].

Taking this estimate from the TIMSS data as an indicator of the percentage of teachers who had majored or minored in mathematics or science, this proportion was considerably higher than for the PROM/SE 4th-grade teachers, where the comparable percentage was 5%. The percentage was over 50% in Singapore and Russia. This suggests that, from an international perspective, other countries typically have around six times as many primary teachers who have a specialization in mathematics or in a related field of science.

The result is even more disturbing when we turn to the middle school mathematics curriculum and the higher level of mathematics offered there.

Three out of four middle school teachers in the PROM/SE sample did not have a specialization in mathematics. At 6th grade, the percentage was much like that for primary teachers—only around 10% had a major or minor in mathematics. In 7th and 8th grade, this percentage increased to around 35% to 40%.

These numbers indicate that a very large percentage of middle school students were being taught increasingly more complex mathematics, as called for in the Michigan and Ohio state standards, by teachers who lacked a strong background in mathematics. These results offer one explanation for why so many middle school teachers did not feel very well prepared to teach many of the middle school topics discussed in the previous section. This also foreshadows problems of implementation, at least as the newly adopted Common Core State Standards are put in place, in Michigan and Ohio.

What about high school mathematics teachers? We would expect that all high school mathematics teachers would have at least a minor in mathematics, if not a major. But the actual results for high school are quite surprising. Less than half of all high school mathematics teachers surveyed had a major in mathematics. Almost one-third did not have either a major or a minor in mathematics.

These numbers varied across the four grades of high school taught by the surveyed teachers. Almost one-half of the teachers whose major teaching responsibilities were at 9th or 10th grade did not have any specialization in mathematics. In 11th and 12th grades, over 71% of the teachers who taught primarily at those grades had some kind of specialization in mathematics.

Lest it seem too heartening that those teaching the most advanced courses (usually taken in the 11th and 12th grades) are better prepared in mathematics, we need to consider several caveats. It may be even more important to have well prepared teachers in entry-level courses usually taught in 9th and 10th grades. These courses serve as the foundation for more-advanced courses, may be even more difficult to teach, and are just as important in terms of preparing students for further study. But for these foundational courses, teacher content knowledge was not nearly as strong. It is worth noting that on some of the more advanced mathematics topics (number theory, geometric transformations, logarithmic and trigonometric functions, and calculus) up to half of the teachers did not feel very well prepared to teach them. Perhaps these same 50% were those who did not have a major in mathematics.

Mathematics Knowledge

One key part of the PROM/SE project was planning and carrying out content-based capacity building for teachers. As a part of this component, we administered a test of mathematics knowledge to a sample of teachers. [The results] strongly suggest that elementary and middle school teachers perceived their weaknesses accurately and reported them honestly. They appeared to be reporting that they were not well prepared academically to teach the mathematics content that they were being asked to teach.

Across grades, the percentage of teachers who did not have a major or minor in mathematics ranged from nearly all of the teachers at 1st grade to around one-half of them at 8th grade. These same teachers were able to answer correctly only about half of the items, as compared with teachers with mathematics majors who were teaching at the corresponding grades. The teachers with mathematics majors were able to correctly answer about 70% of the same items. This gap of almost 20% is sizable and very important. It confirms what the teachers told us when they said that they were not well prepared.

The problem at high school is more a problem of variability. The data indicated that most of the teachers had mathematics majors and that their mathematics knowledge was reasonably good. However, about one-third still did not have strong academic preparation.

The Effects of Teachers’ Mathematics Knowledge on Opportunities to Learn

Given these results about teachers’ mathematics knowledge, it is tempting to blame elementary and middle school teachers for not being prepared, but we believe blaming teachers is a mistake. Why? Because teachers prepare themselves according to the standards and guidelines established by the states that certify them and the teacher preparation programs that train them. Our point here is that such variation in academic content knowledge is likely to affect the quality of content coverage. Since the content coverage described previously varied appreciably, these data indicate one possible reason for such variation as it is very likely that this lack of knowledge influences not only the quality of the coverage of particular topics but also the bigger picture as to how the teacher makes choices about which topics to cover, for how long (to what depth), and in what sequence. Such

lack of knowledge further exacerbates the variation in content coverage in mathematics across classrooms, schools, and districts, resulting in further inequalities in opportunities to learn.

Used with permission from the Publisher. From Schmidt & McKnight, Inequality for All: The Challenge of Unequal Opportunity in American Schools, New York: Teachers College Press, © 2012 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

Manhattanhenge, by EffingBoring via Flickr

Invited Guest Post by Evelyn Lamb (@evelynjlamb)

Later today the setting sun will align with Manhattan’s street grid to produce a striking phenomenon dubbed “Manhattanhenge.” Taking its name from the more famous Stonehenge in England, where the sun rises over the prominent Heel Stone on the summer solstice, Manhattanhenge happens twice a year, once about three weeks before the summer solstice (May 29th and 30th this year) and once about three weeks after (this Wednesday and Thursday).

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the city’s American Museum of Natural History, is credited with “discovering” the phenomenon, which has grown in popularity since he published a photo of the setting sun from a vantage point looking west down 34th Street about a decade ago. An astrophysicist in one of the most densely populated places in the country, Tyson has spent a lot of time finding ways to connect New Yorkers to the astronomical world, and he is glad that Manhattanhenge has resonated with so many people.

Despite what some New Yorkers may think, the sun rises and sets all over the world, so in theory any city laid out on a grid, or even an individual straight road, might have its own “henge.” How can we play along at home, and find out when we might see our own neighborhood henge event?

First, here’s a little background on henges. Why do they occur, and why twice a year? Contrary to popular belief, the sun doesn’t quite rise in the east and set in the west daily. Away from the equator, the sun only rises at due east and sets at due west twice a year: at the equinoxes in March and September. After the March equinox that heralds spring in the Northern Hemisphere (autumn in the Southern), the azimuths, or directional bearings, of sunrise and sunset move north, then stop at the June solstice and head back south, passing through the September equinox before hitting the December solstice and reversing direction once more.

The farther north a Northern Hemisphere location is—and the farther south a Southern Hemisphere location is—the more offset a grid can be and still line up with the sun at some point in the year. Manhattan’s grid, for example, is about 29 degrees off from the geographical grid, not quite as tilted as the angle of sunset at the summer solstice, so the sun lines up with the grid a few weeks away from the summer solstice on either side.

Finding the date when the sun will rise or set directly along the line of your street involves calculating the azimuth of both the sun and the road (or other candidate landmarks) in question. The azimuth is measured in degrees clockwise from north, so due east is 90 degrees, south is 180 and west is 270. Manhattan’s tilt of 29 degrees corresponds to an azimuth of 119 to the east and 299 to the west.

To find your own street’s henge azimuth, you can use the interactive online compass at http://googlecompass.com/ and search for your address, or whatever city or landmark you are interested in. When you have zoomed in to a comfortable level, click on “Show Compass” at the bottom left. A compass will appear on the map. You can drag this compass to whatever location you want on the screen and then rotate it around until the arrow points in the direction of the street in question. To find a sunrise henge, point the arrow toward the east; for a sunset, point the arrow to the west. The degree of the angle the arrow makes with true north will appear in the top right corner.

A number of factors influence the direction of sunrise and sunset in a particular place at a particular time. Latitude and time of year are chief, but the ellipticity of Earth’s orbit and the fact that the planet is not quite spherical must also be taken into account. Luckily, you don’t have to work out the equations yourself: you can purchase astronomy software or use the U.S. Naval Observatory or SunEarth Tools to look up the sun’s altitude and azimuth.

Input a place name or geographic coordinates and a date into the forms on either Web site. A table will come up with the altitude and azimuth of the sun throughout the day. To correct for the atmospheric refraction and apparent size of the sun (an optical illusion that happens when the sun approaches the horizon), look at an altitude slightly below zero to find the azimuth of the sun at sunrise or sunset. If the sunrise or sunset azimuth matches your street azimuth, you’ve got a henge!

A reverse-lookup option for sunrise/sunset azimuth does not seem to be available, so you can’t ask the table what day the sun will have a particular azimuth. You’ll have to play around a bit to find the date of your henge. If you are looking for a sunset henge, check your location on June 20th if the grid is tilted clockwise and December 21st if the grid is tilted counterclockwise; these are the solstice dates and will let you know whether your street has a henge at all. (If your street axis is tilted farther from due east or west than the azimuth on the solstice, you’re out of luck.)

When you have determined whether there is a theoretical henge, you can adjust the date to pinpoint it precisely. Try moving the date a month away from the solstice and take note of how the sunrise or sunset azimuth changes. You’ll be able to adjust the date from there to find your henge. It takes a bit of practice, but you don’t need to be entirely precise. As with Manhattanhenge, there may be a few dates when the sun lines up with the street grid at different points of sunrise or sunset, and they may all be fun to watch.

To find a spectacular henge near you, look for an area with clear weather, imposing buildings or natural features, clear visibility to the horizon and straight roads. Chicago, with its skyscraper-filled downtown and near-perfect east–west grid, might yield beautiful sunrise henges over Lake Michigan on the equinoxes. Some Toronto residents have figured out that the 16-degree counterclockwise offset of their grid yields Torontohenge sunsets in February and October. And it should be possible for anyone reckless enough to walk to the middle of the busy Champs–Elysées in the seventh or eighth arrondissement of Paris at sunset on August 12 to see the setting sun shining through the Arc de Triomphe!

Sunset looking down 34th Street, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, 2001

If you’re in New York City and want to see Manhattanhenge, your best bet is to go as far east in Manhattan as possible along a wide east-west street. The Empire State Building on 34th and the Chrysler Building on 42nd create particularly striking views. You can also attend a program at the Hayden Planetarium on Wednesday night to learn more about Manhattanhenge.

For the rest of you, we want to know where you’re trying to find a henge. Is your street on a grid? Do you have a view of mesas in the Southwest, the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis or another man-made or natural feature that might frame the sun in a particularly beautiful way? If you figure out a location and date or get a great shot, tell us in the comments or post it on Twitter and tag it with #HereAHenge so we can see what you found.

Shongwe, left, and Mahlalela

Two teenagers from the southern African country of Swaziland have won Scientific American’s inaugural Science in Action award, part of the Google Science Fair. The prize is awarded to a project that addresses a social, environmental or health issue to make a practical difference in the lives of a group or community. This year’s winners are Sakhiwe Shongwe of Siteki and Bonkhe Mahlalela of Simunye, both 14. Their project explores an affordable way to provide hydroponics to poor subsistence farmers, enabling them to grow their crops and vegetables in very large quantities and within limited space without using soil. In addition to a $50,000 prize, Shongwe and Mahlalela will have access to a year’s mentorship and will travel to Google’s California headquarters in July to compete in the 13-to-14-year-old age category in the overall Google Science Fair. Here are excerpts from an interview conducted via e-mail with each winner before they knew they had won, by Scientific American’s Rachel Scheer.

Q. Why did you decide to enter the Google Science Fair?

Shongwe: After our science teacher told us about the Google Science Fair in class, I saw the GSF as an instrument and opportunity to showcase my science skills. Being born and raised in Swaziland, I have experienced the challenges that our country is facing. My work in many community development projects, through the mentorship of our teacher and environmental club patron teacher, stimulated me to ask questions. Visiting the GSF site for the first time in January 2012, the phrase that dominated my mind was “Everybody has a question, what is yours?” I quickly wrote a few of my questions and that was the start of the project.

Mahlalela: At first it was just about helping my friend who has taken teacher’s advice to think big and take part in such activities such as the Google Science Fair. I felt the need to help myself, my family and the community at large. We then asked our teacher if this is a good idea. I remember our teacher saying,”Go for it boys, this is brilliant.” I never believed in myself but today Google Science Fair has built a very high self-esteem within me.

Q. How does your project impact the community you grew up in?

Shongwe: I believe that Swaziland neither needs the tons of food aid coming from western and eastern countries, nor complex strategies which the country cannot afford to solve low food productivity. Educating subsistence farmers is the key, and our experimental project has proven to be one of the best approaches. If we can empower Swazi subsistence farmers with such knowledge of simplified hydroponics, producing organic crops, one challenge, i.e. food shortage in the country, could be significantly reduced. Apart from each family having enough food, surplus crops could be sold to local markets reducing the high food price which are mainly a result of transportation cost of vegetables from South Africa. In addition, the project has positive environmental impacts as it promotes the use of Three R’s [reduce, reuse, recycle] and eliminates soil tilling which results in soil erosion.

Q. What does being recognized as a Science in Action Award finalist mean to you?

Shongwe: It means a lot as I have once considered being a scientist and this could be the start of it all. I see the Google Science Fair as a stage to prove to the community that I don’t have to be an elder within the community to offer help. And yes I cannot express my feelings enough not to mention how Swaziland could change for the better if I win the award. Even if it could not change the whole country, targeting Bonkhe’s community could make a difference, creating a self-sustainable community by developing the people.

Mahlalela: It lets me know that my age does not limit my abilities and that I can be as useful to the community as much as any other person. Being part of a solution in a local community even if we don’t win by the recognition is as important as wining the prize. I believe in myself today and know my time is now not sometime tomorrow when I am old and may not even having energy to solve our community problems.

Q. Who are your scientific inspirations and why?

Shongwe: My scientific inspirations are all the people and businesses which the community has at heart.  This includes my patron teachers, friends who helped me in my project, and business people who invest in community development.

Mahlalela: Albert Einstein and Stephen William Hawking are my scientific inspirations. I find it hard to believe how all their discoveries and contributions to our understanding about the universe is possible. I’m very passionate about physics and physical science. Space science and all the scientific theories and discoveries evolving each day inspire me most.

Q. What do you think was the most revolutionary invention of the past 100 years and why? What about the past 10 years?

Shongwe: I’ll focus on the past 10 years; I think it is the ARVs (antiretroviral drugs) because they save lives. One major challenge of Swaziland today is HIV/AIDS. Swaziland has more than 100,000 orphans (+/- 8.3% of the country’s population) due to HIV/AIDS death in just 10 years, this makes me think of ARV’s for Swaziland is the most revolutionary invention.

However I see every invention revolving around the introduction of computers, internet and software as substantial. Without these all other inventions could take much more time and effort to invent.

Mahlalela: For the past 100 years I think the communication devices and transportation equipment, such as the airplane, is the most revolutionary since it opened a gateway toward globalisation.

For the past 10 years I believe it’s ARVs since they saved a lot of people’s lives.

For more on their project and to read about all the Google Science Fair finalists, click here.

Invited guest post by Summer Ash

On Tuesday June 5^th, Venus will pass between the Earth and the Sun for the second time in eight years and the last time for another 105 years. The transit of Venus, as it is called, is a very rare event in our solar system due to the relative alignments of the orbits of Earth and Venus around the Sun. Venus’ orbit is inclined at an angle just under 3.5° with respect to Earth’s. This may seem small, but on astronomical scales, this means that Venus will only pass between the Earth and the Sun directly along our line of sight twice every 120 years or so. This occurred in 2004, but unfortunately was not visible from much of the U.S. and the next pair of transits won’t take place until 2117.

The importance of this event is now mostly historical, but at one time it was essential to understanding the scale of our Solar System. While Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and Issac Newton’s law of universal gravitation allowed for the calculation of the relative distances of the planets from the Sun, but nothing was known in absolute terms. In 1716, Edmund Halley was the first to propose that measurements of the transit of Venus would allow for the Sun-Earth distance to be estimated. However, it wasn’t until the 1761 and 1769 transits that astronomers were able to obtain useful measurements that led to the first calculations of the true distance between the Earth and the Sun.

(The above graphic originally appeared in The New York Times).

This was accomplished through the principles of parallax. As illustrated in the figure above, two observers on different points of the Earth were needed to observe the transit independently. Each would record the time Venus first crossed into the disk of the Sun and the time it left it. Using the known separation distance of the observers on Earth, the distance to the Sun could then be calculated.

Once the Earth-Sun distance was calculated, the distances to all the other planets known at the time could be derived. As successive transits have occurred, more precise measurements were made and the Earth-Sun distance was refined. It was the last transit in 1882 that yielded our current estimate of approximately 93 million miles and defined our standard distance of the Solar System: the astronomical unit (AU), i.e. 1 AU = 93 million miles.

As you can imagine, coordinating observers around the planet is a lot easier now then it was in the 1700’s and 1800’s. One poor French astronomer was sent to the southeast coast of India to observe the 1761 transit, but his destination was deemed too dangerous en route due to the Seven Year’s war between France and Britain. He tried desperately to reach a safe landing point, but was still at sea when the transit occurred and was unable to take any useful data on the rocking deck of the ship. Reasoning that the next transit was only eight years away, he decide to wait it out in the Indian Ocean, passing the time mapping part of Madagascar. When 1769 arrived, he set sail for the Philippines but was once again derailed by international conflict, this time with the Spanish. Retreating to his original target in India, he arrived in plenty of time to view the transit only to be thwarted at the last minute by overcast skies. If that weren’t enough, when he finally gathered the strength of mind to return home, his tumultuous journey home culminated in the unpleasant discoveries that he had been declare legally dead, his wife remarried, and his family had divided up his estate.

There have now been six transits of Venus observed by humans since the invention of the telescope in 1609. Here are a few tips for how you can be part of the seventh without having to set sail for a foreign land:

• First, check to make sure you are located in a place where the transit will be visible.
• Decide which method of observing the transit works best for you.
• If you are located somewhere outside of the viewing area or if mother nature decides not to cooperate, never fear, NASA will be webcasting the transit from Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

My method of choice (absent a telescope with a solar filter) is a pinhole projector as it requires little more than some cardboard, some aluminum foil, and a direct sightline to the Sun. It also enables more than one person to watch the transit at a time. The only tradeoff is that the larger you make the projected image of the Sun (i.e., the larger the distance between the two pieces of cardboard), the fainter it gets. You can get around this by using a very long box to enclose the pinhole projector on three sides, which will preserve some of the brightness.

Regardless of your plans for the transit, please remember that you should never look directly at the Sun without proper protection. Viewing the Sun through clouds, sunglasses, unfiltered telescopes, binoculars or cameras can result in instant and permanent damage.

That being said, happy transiting!

Summer Ash is Director of Outreach for the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University and an instructor for Frontiers of Science in the Core Curriculum. Her doctoral research was on the evolution of radio galaxies and active galactic nuclei. She values the power of the scientific method, the history of science and the necessity of skeptical inquiry. As a self-professed space cadet, Summer grew up dragging friends and family out at all hours of the day or night to look up at the sky. In her previous life she was a rocket scientist, but now enjoys getting paid to spread her love of space with anyone who will listen. She attempts to blog at Newtonianism for the Ladies, tweets as @Summer_Ash, and is the in-house Astrophysicist for The Rachel Maddow Show.

The George Washington University engineering school's Pinhas Ben-Tzvi as RobotronMan

A recent survey by Intel found that only 28 percent of teenagers had ever considered becoming engineers and that only 5 percent associated engineering with the word “cool.” That’s not terribly surprising given that engineering ranks in the bottom half of professions with which teens are familiar, falling below teacher, doctor, nurse, police officer, chef, lawyer,  musician, professional athlete, scientist, and computer programmer. (But, surprisingly, above journalist, politician and stock broker).

The good news is that giving teens even a small amount of information about what engineers do helps significantly boost their interest. After reading that “engineers were to thank for saving the Chilean miners who were trapped inside their mine for 69 days,” 52 percent said they’d be much or somewhat more likely to consider a career in engineering, according to the survey.

This is where a new series of comic strips from The George Washington University comes in. Its School of Engineering and Applied Science recently launched an effort to boost student enrollment. In the process, it hit upon an excellent way to translate what engineers do to the general public and to teenagers and to make the profession seem pretty exciting: it turned its faculty into superheroes and gave them starring roles in a series of online comic strips.

In the debut strip, “The Adventures of RobotronMan,” a mechanical engineering professor is called away from class to help rescue earthquake victims.  ”This sounds like a job for RobotronMan,” he says, before transforming into his caped alter ego and flying to his destination. “If I don’t make it back for my 12:25 class … someone cover me.” Once on location, RobotronMan unleashes a swarm of tiny robots that help locate victims and lift heavy rubble to free them.

The comic series is not the first “cool jobs” treatment of scientists I’ve seen (here’s one of my favorite efforts from last year’s World Science Festival), but I think it’s pretty imaginative.

CREDIT: Martin Cron, via Flikr

One day after new test results showed that only 32 percent of U.S. 8^th graders are proficient in science, a group of 26 states has helped draft a document that may bring about a major overhaul of science education in this country.  Known as the Next Generation Science Standards, the draft sets ambitious new expectations for what students should learn in each grade from kindergarten through high school, specifying that evolution and an understanding of how human activity impacts the climate are essential components of scientific literacy. Starting in 2013, states will have the option of adopting these standards and bringing their school curricula in line with them.

The standards are based on recommendations from the National Research Council of the National Academies and address many perceived shortcomings in science education. “Currently, K-12 science education in the United States…is not organized systematically across multiple years of school, emphasizes discrete facts with a focus on breadth over depth, and does not provide students with engaging opportunities to experience how science is actually done,” wrote the authors of the NRC framework.  The standards also put new emphasis on engineering, an area that U.S. teenagers, judging by recent studies, know little about. They also stress process as much as content, explaining how scientists build on and revise their knowledge based on evidence, how they ask questions and define problems, how they develop and use models, and plan and carry out investigations. For example, the standards call for kindergarteners to “use observations to describe how plants and animals depend on the air, land, and water where they live to meet their needs.” Middle schoolers would develop models to represent the “cycling from carbon in the atmosphere to carbon in living things.”

The recommendations also explicitly include the teaching of climate change, evolution, natural selection and the history of Earth. Middle schoolers would “obtain and evaluate information about how two populations of the same species in different environments have evolved to become separate species.” They would also “use system models and representations to explain how human activities significantly impact: (1) the geosphere, (2) the hydrosphere, (3) the atmosphere, (4) the biosphere, and (5) global temperatures.”

Forty-five states plus the District of Columbia recently signed on to common math and language arts standards, and organizers of this effort hope it will be at least as successful. But, says Stephen Pruitt, vice president for content, research and development at Achieve, the Washington, D.C.- based non-profit that is organizing the effort with a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Its’s a draft! We want people to give us feedback and we will be responding to that feedback.”

Are you a parent with a child in public school? Read the standards for the relevant grades and see how they compare with what your child is learning in school this year. Are you a teacher? Then how big of a change do these standards represent for the grades you work with? If you’re a student, then let me know your opinion about what scientists and education experts think you ought to know. And everyone else  whose interested, please weigh in also in the comments section below.

Additional resources:

View the standards here.

Read the National Research Council’s framework on which the standards are based.

Read some of the research on which the NRC based its framework:

“Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8.” National Research Council, 2007. (Free PDF download)

“America’s Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science.“ National Research Council, 2006. (Free PDF download).

“Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits.” National Resarch Council, 2009. (Free PDF download).

Read the Common Core Math and Language Arts standards here.

A goldenrod crab spider getting ready for takeoff. Credit: Jim McCormac

“Charlotte’s Web,” the E.B. White childhood classic, ends with Wilbur the pig eagerly waiting for Charlotte’s baby spiders to emerge from their egg sac. When they finally crawl out, they do something that seems pretty amazing to anyone not familiar with how spiders travel long distances: they fly away. Here’s the passage from the last chapter, “A Warm Wind.”

A warm draft of rising air blew softly through the barn cellar. The air smelled of the damp earth, of the spruce woods, of the sweet springtime. The baby spiders felt the warm updraft. One spider climbed to the top of the fence. Then it did something that came as a great surprise to Wilbur. The spider stood on its head, pointed its spinnerets in the air, and let loose a cloud of fine silk. The silk formed a balloon. As Wilbur watched, the spider let go of the fence and rose into the air.

“Good-bye!” screamed Wilbur. “Where do you think you’re going?”

But the spider was already out of sight.

Charlotte’s hatchlings were ‘ballooning,’ which is the method that baby spiders use to disperse themselves through nature.  Adults sometimes balloon as well. Curious about the phenomenon, I wrote to Richard Bradley, an entomologist who studies spiders at Ohio State University, for some advice on how to spot a ballooning spider in the wild. Here’s his reply:

Ballooning can occur whenever the weather is right, even in summer. It is actually most frequently observed in the autumn around here [Marion, Ohio].

The key is weather. You need a relatively calm air or a slight breeze, ballooning doesn’t happen often in wind.  The rising air currents created by the sun heating the ground are the launching force for these tiny flights.  In my experience a calm relatively cool early morning with strong sun is best.  Then go to exposed places with prominent launch pads.  Small bushes, stumps, fences or fence posts are frequently best.

That is the good news. The bad news is that it is a hit-and-miss proposition to actually find ballooning spiders.  The ones that use this technique are often very tiny.  On cool clear mornings, if you see silk lines on the foliage or fences of a park (such as Central Park in NYC), watch closely at the uppermost tips of the fence posts.  On occasion there will be a field (even an infrequently mown lawn) with lots of small webbing or silk that is visible, particularly on a dewy morning.  If you find this, you might be in for a treat.  Sadly, it isn’t that easy to observe.

Adults of small spiders may balloon, so it isn’t always spiderlings (a precious word that arachnologists use for “baby spiders”).  I’ve seen fair sized adults use this technique, but that is less common.  It (the phenomenon of ballooning spiders) does occur everywhere.

Good luck, I’d love to hear if you have any success.

 

Same here. I will be doing my best this summer to catch some ballooning on camera. If you do the same, please share what you’ve observed.

In the meantime, here are some other spider and ballooning resources:

A vivid account of ballooning by Ohio naturalist and blogger Jim McCormac

“What Are Spiders?” by Richard Bradley