Interaction exhibits take science to the people
IMPERIAL — A bold hands-on science project, Imperil Valley Discovery Zone, has students so riveted even when models fail, they find troubleshooting fun.
“We initiate the entire design process and if it doesn’t work we go back to the drawing board,” said Reina Walker, Imperial High School senior and IVDZ project producer. “Sometimes it’s frustrating work but it’s exciting to problem-solve.”
Offering inquiry-based STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) Imperial High School science teachers Dan and Dennis Gibbs launched IVDZ four years ago to boost STEM literacy among second-, third- and fourth-grade students. IVDZ is facilitated by high school students who create interactive experiments for public venues such as Market Days and California Mid-Winter Fair & Fiesta. IVDZ maintains a workshop where students can craft exhibits to teach primary grades fundamental principles of STEM.
“We’re making sure STEM is the way we’re synchronized with Common Core and our goal is increase STEM education three ways,” said Dan. “First we train up high school students to facilitate STEM lessons to our elementary students. Then we keep a makerspace at school to create model experiments to display. And next we take these exhibits into public forums to impress upon the public STEM is not only critical to adults but it is their kids future because that’s where the jobs are headed.”
At last year’s Frozen Christmas Downtown Imperial, Dennis demonstrated a student built miniature geyser, that he insisted any Edison want-to-be can construct in a makeshift lab with simple supplies from Lowe’s.
“Our geyser works like Old Faithful only it’s smaller and instead of erupting every 86 minutes, ours takes only six,” he said.
“We do it kind of out of the box since we’ve been presented with the Next Generation Science Standards, and there’s no published program to address that,” said Dan. “Next Generation Science Standards is more of kids doing science, discovering concepts themselves than teaching out of a book.”
They achieve this by using local phenomena to make STEM curriculum more relevant, such as field trips to observe Salton Sea restoration projects or the Split Mountain Gorge at the Anza-Borrego State Park, a nature walk students can learn from observation points on the trail.
Sonora Shelton is another senior working with Reina on a functioning model of the human eye that shadows a class lesson, “Light and sight: what the eye needs in order to see.”
“We’re making the model so we can manipulate the eye to be in or out of focus,” said Sonora. “So whatever object is in front of the eye it appears on the back, the optic nerve, but upside down like our eyes (or camera), which the brain flips the image right side up.”
Added Reina, “I really like the hands-on tech aspects, working with a 3-D printer, some plastic parts and a lens we’ll probably buy online,” she said. “But I definitely like working in the community at Market Days.”
And Sonora stressed, “We hope people understand how their own eye works. It’s more complicated than you think. The eye is sometimes accepted as a birth right.”
Reina is headed to Grand Canyon University this fall as a forensic science major and aspires to a career with the FBI. Meanwhile, Sonora is off to University of California, San Diego to study human biology, to become an optometrist.
We’re falling behind in math and science compared to the other industrialized nations,” said Dan. “But we’re taking a bottom-up approach, rather than appealing to Washington D.C.”
Helping that process is State Farm Insurance that presented Imperial Unified School District with a $5,000 check for the IVDZ project on Tuesday. Marianne Fenley, State Farm Brawley agent, noted STEM education is much needed in the area.
“Our demographic is low-income and the only way to get out of that is persevere and get ahead,” she said.
Science is a way of initiating problem-solving, even if a person is not a scientist, remarked Dennis.
“Approaching problems in a systematic way has value no matter what you do in life,” he said. “Don’t take things for granted. Think of things analytically, the beauty is in the details.”