In spring 2024, UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering graduate students taught Armour Elementary School junior high school students how to bend light. They didn’t do it through lectures and textbook diagrams, but by having the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders do it for themselves.
“The students had to get the light from one side to the other, and had to use these blocks to block it. So some were blocks and some were mirror blocks, and they had to figure out how to get the light to bend to get to the ending spot. It got more aggressively challenging, but they had to keep persevering through it,” said STEM Coordinator Ariana Schachne. “They loved it.”
The experiment that created this excitement was part of a learning experience designed and led by PME graduate student José A. Méndez as a Junior Science Café. In the free program, one of PME’s many Educational Outreach offerings, graduate students in the PME Science Communications Program develop and then teach engaging, exciting, and fun classroom activities for middle school students.
Chicago Public School teachers interested in hosting a Junior Science Café for the spring of 2025 should email pme-outreach@uchicago.edu.
“Visiting neighborhood school classrooms is a great opportunity for everyone to learn,” said Assistant Dean of Education and Outreach Laura Rico-Beck. “Middle schoolers engage with STEM thinking and innovation and see possibilities for themselves and the future, and researchers hone their skills to effectively connect with and help others make meaning about the relevance and importance of their work.”
Michelle Warden, STEM Technology Specialist for Wadsworth Elementary in Woodlawn, said seeing her class get excited about science is the best part for her.
“You've got to see how they're leaning over the table, and everybody's looking and trying to eyeball and see what they're supposed to be seeing,” she said. “That’s all a teacher wants. That's all we want for our classes. And whenever I've had the graduate students come and work with the kids, that’s exactly what they’re getting.”
“They’re not bored, and they're not faking it either,” she said. “You can't fake this kind of excitement.”
Grad school to grade school
PME PhD candidate Omar Kazi said presenting high-level science to junior high schoolers isn’t about simplifying. It’s about focusing, refining the lesson in a way that’s accessible even without a collegiate background.
“It's really just a matter of distilling down the message to the core components,” Omar said. “We get scientists get caught up in a lot of technical jargon. These big words scare people away and make things more confusing than they need to be.”
Distilling was also key to Kazi’s lesson itself. Kazi modified his research on protecting global freshwater resources into a hands-on lesson where students built their own water purification system to filter out food coloring. As the students saw the water get clearer but never fully clear, they learned an important lesson about how pollutants never truly go away.
“I want to know how I can give them a lesson that they'll think about afterwards, that they'll remember next year and for years after that,” Kazi said.
Immunology PhD candidate Thao Cao, who presented on how immune system cells work together like members of a community, was impressed by the questions and ideas the students brought to the discussion.
“Young students are a particularly important audience because they have a lot of curious questions and creative, thoughtful insights, and genuine interests in learning about the world around them,” Cao said. “I find it a very meaningful, humbling, and refreshing experience to share about my research topics with the children.”
Hands-on science
Many of Schachne’s students at Armour Elementary in Bridgeport are not native English speakers. Although many involved in the program, including Rico-Beck, speak Spanish, the hands-on nature of Junior Science Cafés means language wasn’t a barrier to science.
“They didn't need to be able to speak about it, but they were able to actually understand the concept of bending light because of the way it was shown to them,” she said. “I've worked with UChicago for many years now, I think Junior Science Cafés is an awesome opportunity. My students love it. They love to meet people. But even beyond that, we now have been able to go on field trips and visit the engineering building on campus. So what started with just Junior Science Cafés has propelled us into having a full-blown Armour-UChicago relationship.”
As part of the PME Science Communications Program, graduate students leading Junior Science Cafés learn to communicate to audiences from schoolchildren to scientists in other fields to potential investors in new products and innovations.
“Even on the scientific side, it's important for us to think about how we can inspire the next generation,” Kazi said. “There are lots of inequities that we can also work to break down by doing outreach in communities that haven't always had those same resources and programs.”
Schachne said having actual engineering students come into class humanizes the science in a way just doing the lessons alone couldn’t accomplish.
“I tell my students I'm not an engineer by trade, I'm a teacher by trade, and I want students to meet people who are actually doing the work, who are actually engineers, who are studying it, who are researching on it, who are actually making a difference in the world,” Schachne said.
The inspiration goes both ways.
“The most memorable moment for me was at the end of the café, when I said goodbye to the class, one sixth grader came up to me and gave me a hug,” Cao said. “She said that after today's lesson, she wanted to become a scientist.”