Thalia Reyes (left) and Maria Murillo, physics students at Pasadena’s John Muir High School, try to turn on a light-emitting diode (LED) with a battery made from a potato, a zinc nail, and a penny during a CCC-assisted lab session. Photo by their physics teacher, Dave Herman.

Caltech Connects with Local Classrooms

As a Caltech grad student, I never get to work at a quarter after 7 a.m., but when I join science teacher Tobias Jacoby in his classroom at Blair High School in Pasadena, this is when my day begins. Mr. Jacoby and I have been paired up through the Caltech Classroom Connection (CCC), an outreach program that brings together Caltech graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff with Pasadena teachers. The hope is that putting people who practice and love science into the classroom might inspire students to take it more seriously—in their course work, and maybe also in their career plans.

The guidelines for interaction within teacher-Techer pairings are pretty loose; each pair decides how to spend their time together. For some teachers, science is a little outside their comfort zone, and they enjoy the confidence boost of having an expert volunteer on hand to field difficult questions. “It’s so great to have someone with me who I don’t have to explain everything to, because he just knows,” gushed one teacher, describing her volunteer at a recent CCC dinner. Other teachers—like Jacoby, who is perfectly at ease explaining torque, momentum, and kinetic energy—can really use an extra set of hands, as well as someone to bounce ideas off of for new labs and activities.

During my classroom visits, I have mostly been helping out with labs and problem-solving sessions. Today I am helping out with a physics lab on collisions, and before the students arrive we set up five-foot-long, low-friction tracks on tables around the classroom. We place two brick-like carts with magnetic front bumpers on each track. The students will roll one cart into the other, stationary cart to observe how momentum is conserved in elastic and inelastic collisions. In an elastic collision, the magnets repel each other, and the carts rebound. In an inelastic collision, the bumperless ends collide with a satisfying “thunk,” and the moving cart comes to rest, sending the stationary cart rolling down the track. A motion detector positioned at one end of each track records the positions and velocities of the carts over time.

There are 45 students in this class, one of two large classes Jacoby teaches in addition to a smaller IB (international baccalaureate) group. At first glance they seem to be masterfully combining high social energy with academic lethargy: friends giggle and chat and seem to pay no mind to the assignment at hand. They make the people I interact with in an average day at Caltech seem awfully sedate.

I circulate among the groups. There are some questions about the instructions. I demonstrate the use of the motion tracker for one group, sliding the cart slowly along the track as the position and velocity are plotted on a laptop screen. “Wow,” said one girl. “I actually understood that because someone actually explained it to me.” She just made my day.

It’s a challenge to come up with activities aligned with the state’s science standards, using inexpensive and readily available materials. CCC volunteers are succeeding admirably and having fun in the process. One volunteer used Kool-Aid to demonstrate the concept of molarity to a chemistry class. The students made several batches of Kool-Aid with different proportions of powder and water, and then calculated the concentration—or molarity—of sugar in each, by assuming that Kool-Aid is 100 percent glucose. They then related how the drinks tasted to their sugar concentrations. Another volunteer demonstrated that energy could take on different forms by powering an LED with a battery made by sticking a zinc nail and a copper penny into a potato. Volunteers are endowed with a small budget for supplies; after purchasing a graphing calculator for his class, a volunteer demonstrated for his group how optimization can be used to figure out the most efficient combination of ingredients to make Cheez Whiz.

As I relive the high-school physics curriculum, it strikes me, as it has many, that science as taught in schools doesn’t really tell kids anything about how scientists do their jobs. In my class, I hope to use some of the time devoted to magnetism to tell students about one of the tools I use in my own neuroscience research: magnetic resonance imaging. Maybe with the help of some cool pictures, showing detailed brain structures and specific regions that light up when people learn reward associations, I can impress upon them that physics is important for many fields of study: biology, psychology, medicine, and engineering.

The CCC works with the Pasadena Unified School District, which has seen its ups and downs through the years. As a district where a high proportion of parents send their kids to private schools, the public system is left to fend for itself. In my classroom, the diverse group of students is friendly and open with each other, and Blair strikes me as a safe and genial place to learn. That said, class sizes are large, resources are scarce, and state test scores are often below standard.

Founded in 2002 by Eddie Branchaud (MS, PhD ’06), then a mechanical-engineering graduate student, the CCC has grown from just a few teacher-Techer pairings to 20 this year. This growth has been possible thanks to funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Caltech’s Moore-Hufstedler Fund, the Mattel Children’s Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, secured with the help of faculty director Christina Smolke, assistant professor of chemical engineering. This generous support has enabled the hiring of James Maloney (MS ’06) as full-time codirector. He acts as an ambassador for the project, visiting local schools and sitting on education committees. His presence has helped secure an ample supply of teachers who are interested in participating in the program—what they need now is Caltech volunteers to match. (If you think you might be interested in participating, please visit here or email.)

Graduate students Tara Gomez and Jennifer Franck (MS ’04) codirect with Maloney. The trio is extremely proactive about providing support to volunteers. “We want to make sure that grad students are getting some good teaching experience from the program, and we hope that this will help them decide if they want teaching to be a part of their future,” says Franck.

It’s really striking how much fun volunteers are having with students at all levels. As a scientist walking into a third-grade class, “you get treated like a rock star,” says Maloney. Kids that age are so naturally curious that a simple, hands-on demonstration can be the basis for a great lesson.

My high-school group is a little more aloof, and at first I worried that they would just dismiss me as a hopeless nerd. They very well may, but I’m not in high school anymore—so who cares? My students always make me laugh, and if I can say or do some small thing to help them squeeze a passing grade out of the torture session that is high-school physics, then we will both be happy. —SB

Signe Bray is a graduate student in computational and neural systems who does brain imaging in the labs of Professor of Biology Shinsuke Shimojo and Assistant Professor of Psychology John O’Doherty.