Gloopy polymer worms, laser-pointer Picassos and beeping, buzzing cancer cells took the stage Saturday as UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering graduate students showed off their love of science to the young public.
The MSI STEM Showcase, a component of PME's Science Communications Program, brought 19 engineering PhD students to Chicago’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. The PME students spent months honing their science communication skills and selecting experiments that showed off scientific principles in ways that grabbed kids’ attention.
PhD candidate Michelle Bessiake built a display where students used laser pointers to “paint” on paper treated with a glow-in-the-dark material. She deliberately selected some light colors that would paint (blue, white) and some that wouldn’t (red, green) as a segue to explaining that light is energy, and some spectra of the rainbow have higher energies than others.
“Having science be accessible is how you get started,” Bessiake said. “These kids are getting so excited about these things because they’re being introduced to science in a fun way.”
PhD candidate Lily Alperstein said designing lessons for children is good practice for sharing expertise whether talking to grade schoolers or grad schoolers. Her experiment guided children as they stirred sodium alginate into plastic cups of solution before pulling out long, gooey strings of polymers.
“What we’re researching and what we’re learning really means nothing if you can’t teach it to others,” Alperstein said.
Sharing love
The PhD candidates weren’t required to match their demonstrations to their research tracks. While Alperstein’s worms dovetailed with her polymer work in the Rowan Group, for example, Bessiake’s light experiment was unconnected to her immunology work.
However, Jamila Eatman, a joint PhD candidate between PME and Argonne National Laboratory, said it’s quite natural that if people love a field enough to devote their lives to it, they want to share that love with others. For her, it’s ensuring clean drinking water, which is why she leapt at the chance to show public audiences how to filter sludge using stones of different sizes.
“You can experiment here. I absolutely adore water filtration and I wanted to be able to extend my love of water filtration to those who come up to the table,” she said. “It really depends on what you feel called to do and I felt called to do water filtration.”
Ryne Montoya, an immunology PhD student in the Hubbell Lab, 3D-printed a series of colorful mock cells designed to catch museum goers’ eyes and imaginations. One was built with a sensor that, when held over each other cell, would beep, buzz and have a nearby computer screen display a cartoon white blood cell sheriff saying whether the cell was cancerous or cleared of all charges.
“It's a great way to visually understand what's actually happening,” Montoya said. “As scientists, it's important understand and build these analogies that better communicate complicated ideas.”
Building knowledge
Assistant Dean of Education and Outreach Laura Rico-Beck said the event was “the culmination of a lot of hard work.”
“The students spent many, many hours together honing communication skills, trying things out, taking risks, getting out of their comfort zone, and developing their ability to dynamically adapt how they communicate their work to a broad range of audiences,” she said.
Thomas Marchese, another joint PME/Argonne PhD candidate, said he felt at home manning the microscope to show passersby how sponges, $5 bills and other common items look up close.
Marchese comes from a line of first-grade teachers on his mother’s side and engineers on his father’s side.
“I took both my parents’ jobs and then combined them,” he said, laughing. “Science communication is something I enjoy, but it also helps scientists consider how we understand things and how we build knowledge.”
Attendee Bernadette Neal said the STEM Showcase helped bolster her 8-year-old daughter Grace’s science education.
“When I try to look for STEM camps, it's just so expensive. You have so many different areas of science presented here that you can try experimentally. With each one, she's getting exposed to a different area,” Neal said. “I'm hoping this will help her get more interested in science and then maybe even figure out what areas of science she might be interested in pursuing.”