Science has students in their element
Centennial Middle School seventh-grader Stephanie Town poured sugar and water into a bucket Wednesday and stirred the sticky substance like a mad scientist, spilling much of it on the floor.
“It’s sinking,” said another girl while peering into the bucket. Now there was a gaggle of girls around the container.
Town added a beakerful of root beer extract, followed by yeast, which will, eventually, make it fizzy.
“I didn’t even know there was science involved in root beer,” Town said. “When you look at the bottle, you don’t really think how it was made up.”
The experiment wasn’t for a grade or a school project. It was just for the fun of it.
Town is among about 22 seventh-grade girls from the West Valley middle school who benefit from a four-year grant to attract young women to careers in science, math and technology.
The girls meet once a week after school to learn the science of making root beer with the new Biotech Club.
Using science, language arts and math, they will come up with their own soda and a business plan to sell it online – hence the biology-technology name.
“All my friends were doing it, and it sounded like a lot of fun. I love hands-on stuff,” said Katie Welch, 13. “And I’m not graded on it, which is even better.”
The grant was awarded through local nonprofit group The Inland Northwest Community Access Network. The organization is entirely grant-funded and provides education support for social, economic and community development with an emphasis on technology.
The grant money for Centennial’s program came from the Women Education Equity Act, a federal program designed to promote educational equity for women and girls. It will also be taught at East Valley Middle School.
“In middle school, girls get a little more self-conscious, and they don’t want to outdo the boys,” said Pam Francis, Centennial principal. “This is to really reinforce the idea that girls in science are needed, they can lead the way, and we certainly need that.”
The nonprofit group provided two teachers this year to run the after-school clubs. Those teachers will pass leadership to school staff who will learn the curriculum in a summer workshop. .
The seventh-grade girls in this year’s pilot class can join the club again as eighth-graders. As eighth-graders, they would work on creating a crime scene investigation video game.
“These kids will do more communicating using technology, buying, selling and obtaining jobs – more so than any other generation,” said Tara Neumann, the director of teen programs for the community access network. “We’ve got to give them the skills to succeed.”