Yale Bulletin and Calendar

May 2, 2008|Volume 36, Number 28|Two-Week Issue

Daniel Santavicca (left) and high school senior Paul Corona confer on their science fair project.

Outreach programs showing city students science is ‘a pathway to their future’

Daniel Santavicca, a doctoral student in applied physics, is conducting research on the high frequency electrical and electro-thermal properties of nanoscale devices in Professor Daniel Prober’s lab, but one day a week he sets that aside and coaches Paul Corona, a Hillhouse High School senior.

The two are working on a project about high frequency power emission from cell phones that Corona will present at the City-Wide Science Fair, being held May 13-15 in Commons Dining Hall.

The fair is just one of many cooperative programs between Yale and the New Haven Public Schools designed to encourage young people to study science and consider careers in the sciences. Taken together, these programs involve more than 10,000 New Haven young people in Yale-sponsored activities every year. This past fall, Yale hired Joanna Price to coordinate and expand the community science outreach.

The New Haven Science Fair started in 1995 with participation by seven public schools. In the years since, it has expanded to include almost all of the schools in the system. Now, more than 8,000 public school students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade participate in the City-Wide Science Fair.

The goal of the Science Fair is to encourage students and their teachers at all grade levels to carry out investigative, hands-on projects that will promote skills in critical thinking and communication.

In the first round, students prepare and present projects at their schools, with younger grades working together as a class and older students working in small groups or individually. The winners from each school are invited to exhibit at Yale. Nearly 900 New Haven students typically demonstrate their projects in Commons, and winners often go on to the state competition.

Yale has been a strong supporter of the Science Fair. Last year, 40 of the 65 people serving as mentors to the students were from Yale, including 25 graduate students, three undergraduates, five postdoctoral fellows, five faculty members and two research scientists. Of the 120 judges who evaluated projects at the fair itself, 48 were Yale faculty members or students. As of February, 34 of the 43 individuals who had signed up to serve as mentors for this year’s fair were from Yale.

This is actually Santavicca’s second turn at coaching for the Science Fair. Last year, he mentored a team of three young women from Connecticut Scholars’ Academy (a satellite program of Wilbur Cross High School) on a project to determine the optimal resolution for digital images. Their project won second place in the Team Physical Sciences category and a cash prize for the high school.

“The idea to do a project on photography came from the students,” Santavicca says. “Together we refined the idea to a study of image resolution in digital photographs.” For the project, the students took a digital image and — using Adobe Photoshop and a high-resolution printer — reproduced the same image on a page six times, each time the same size but with a different number of pixels. Then they asked people to look at the page at arm’s length and to list the six photos in order, from worst resolution to best resolution.

“The idea was that people would no longer be able to see any difference beyond a certain resolution,” says Santavicca. “The students found that above about 180 pixels per inch, most people could no longer identify the higher-resolution image — at least, not with a probability better than random guessing. The implication is that having a resolution higher than about 180 pixels per inch is really just wasted memory for a digital image.”

Santavicca and the team met weekly over a period of about four months. “They would take a bus over to my lab after they got out of school, and we would work for about an hour and a half per week,” he says. “I like working with students in a research lab, because I think it gives them a good sense of what scientists and engineers really do. Also, there is a lot of useful equipment and fun demos that you can do in a lab.”

Richard Therrien, K-12 science supervisor for the New Haven Public Schools, says that the Science Fair helps youngsters “to make connections with their studies and the real work of actual science researchers” and give them an opportunity to see that “science is a pathway to their future.”

Prober, professor and chair of applied physics at Yale, agrees. “Science fairs are great for getting our next generation excited, as potential scientists and engineers, and as citizens,” he says.

The Yale scientist has been very involved in promoting sciences in the city’s public schools. He taught a course on “Everyday Science” in the New Haven Teachers Institute, a program that brings city instructors together with Yale faculty to strengthen the public school’s curriculum.

Professor Daniel Prober dresses as "Mr. Wizard" when he visits New Haven schools to demonstrate scientific concepts for children.

Prober also goes into classrooms in the city schools dressed as the 1950s-era television character “Mr. Wizard” in order to demonstrate fundamental scientific concepts in an entertaining way. For his lesson on light and color, for instance, he wears a lab coat tie-dyed in all the colors of the spectrum. He loans the students spectroscopy glasses, which break down light into its component colors, so they can test their effect on various light sources, and he gives some of these glasses to the teachers to keep for future use. For these efforts, and for his efforts in judging Science Fair projects, he was given the Connecticut Pre-Engineering Program’s Volunteer of the Year Award in 2006.

The following is a brief look at some — although by no means all — of the other science-oriented cooperative programs between Yale and the New Haven Public Schools.

One collaboration that has been hailed as an unqualified success is the ongoing partnership between the Schools of Medicine and Nursing with Hill Regional Career Magnet High School. Established in 1996, the program now brings over 150 students to classes, labs and internships at Yale during the academic year and includes a free, three-week residential academic enrichment program (called SCHOLAR) on campus for more than 60 students each summer.

In another initiative, qualified New Haven high school juniors and seniors can enroll in Yale College academic courses to study subjects not available to them in their schools. The students receive a full scholarship covering tuition costs.

EVOLUTIONS is an after-school program for New Haven middle and high school students based at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. It runs for an entire academic year and emphasizes science literacy, critical thinking, college preparation, career awareness, mentorships, community service and the development of skills.

Volunteers from the Yale School of Nursing bring “Have Bones, Will Travel” to elementary, middle and high schools in New Haven. The program educates students about the marvels of the human body through creative and fun activities that emphasize the importance of making good decisions that impact long-term health.

Yale also participates in the Health Professions Recruitment and Exposure Program, a national high school science enrichment initiative aimed at encouraging African-American, Native-American and Latino students to pursue careers in the sciences and health professions. Each year 40 to 50 New Haven high school students attend a series of Saturday sessions run by Yale minority graduate and professional students.

The University also hosts the Physics Olympics, an annual competition open to high schools across the region at which students have fun while applying basic physics concepts in a practical context. The event is a pentathlon consisting of five 35-minute challenges.

Science Education Outreach Program (SEOP) brings Yale graduate students and postdoctoral fellows into the city’s middle schools to teach topics in genetics and encourage children to consider careers in science. SEOP also tries to demystify stereotypes that kids may have developed about scientists.

Open Spaces as Learning Places opens New Haven students in grade 5 to the concept of environmental stewardship through exploration of city parks and community green spaces in their neighborhoods.

New this year is Girls’ Science Investigations, four Saturday sessions for girls in grades 6-8, who observe scientists at work and take part in hands-on experiments. Bonnie Fleming, assistant professor of physics, coordinates the program. The participants work with cloud chambers, diffraction gratings, UV light and photosensitive paper, and learn such things as how to boil water with ice.

Therrien adds: “New Haven Public Schools are fortunate to have a strong relationship with Yale University. Our students and teachers benefit tremendously from working with scientists and students in a variety of programs.”

According to Price, coordinator of community programs in science at Yale, “Yale is very committed to partnering with New Haven Public Schools to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.” A program such as the upcoming New Haven Science Fair, she adds, “is a terrific example of how we can connect the resources of Yale University to K-12 teachers, students and families.”

For more about science education programs run by Yale faculty, staff and students, visit www.yale.edu/scienceoutreach.

— By Gila Reinstein

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