Science Bus 

Science Bus is a student organization at Stanford that partners with the East Palo Alto Charter School (EPACS) to run an after-school program.  Science education at EPACS formally begins in sixth grade, but through science bus, we engage younger children in science by using hands-on experiments.  We did this by breaking around twenty to thirty kids into groups of around four.  As a tutor for science bus I initially helped lead small groups of children through lessons that would explain the how waves form or the way a heart beats.   

After an initial trial period, I was allowed to design lessons and lead the entire class of tutors and children through the experiments.  My field is biology, but I would learn physics, brush up on my chemistry and tap into my inner engineer.  Once, I brought used computer monitors and hard-drives to the school so that we could dissect them.  I had to use a combination of my engineering graduate student friends and wikipedia to figure out how computers worked myself.  Having to learn the subject first sometimes helped because it made me think carefully about how to build-up knowledge.  Graduate students are specialists.  Specialists are familiar the terms of our own fields, but sometimes we get too comfortable in that language.  Science Bus was incredibly useful for teaching me how to communicate specialized knowledge to others.

Teaching and volunteering through Science Bus was an important way to give back for me.  My science education began young.  My father was still a graduate student in chemistry when I was very little.  Science is way of approaching the world and I learned it at an early age.  It’s way asking questions and a method to finding the answers.  I am very aware of how lucky I was to have the education I did so early.  I participated in Science Bus for three years in graduate school to try and offer this opportunity to others.  I served as president of the student group. (Information on changes we made while I served as president can be found here.)

Kids are natural scientists.  They are constantly curious and trying to understand their world. We wanted to provide them a framework for their curiosity.  The balance to strike is between teaching them methods and also teaching them to see the methods as fluid.  Ultimately, the goal in teaching a lesson, whether it was one I or someone else had designed, was to make it fun. 

The following are links to the materials I made for the computer dissection lesson: 1. Overview; 2. Computer Dissection; and, 3. Diagram.