Mid-America donates nearly 2,000 science kits to HSSD
Nearly 2,000 science kits were donated to the Hot Springs School District Tuesday by Mid-America Science Museum, making it the fourth school district to receive science kits from the museum this year.
Earlier in the year, the museum created 500 science kits that were divided out between the Fountain Lake, Jessieville and Cutter Morning Star school districts. Casey Wylie, the museum’s director of education, said after the success of that project, they decided to replicate the program with a larger school district.
The museum created 1,974 kits for Hot Springs School District, Wylie said, and it was Donna Jared, the museum’s director of development, who was the first to see the need for the kits in the local schools.
“It started when we were closed for COVID in March. Donna was looking into ways we could still impact the community,” Wylie said.
Those initial 500 kits were very well received by the schools and their students and afterward the museum “did a funding campaign to do it again for a bigger district,” Wylie said. The “original idea was for them
to be sent home” with the students, but as the schools are still in session, the kits may be used in the classroom now.
The kits are useful because they offer students a physical experience in a digital age, Wylie said, noting, “They need hands-on experiences. You can’t learn science from a book. You have to learn by doing it.”
The new kits are of better quality than the ones they gave to the schools earlier in the year, she said. “It’s a lot less expensive to do it in bulk” so they were able to put better materials in the boxes.
Each kit has five activities that are designed to be used K-6, Wylie said, noting, “Bigger kids can use them, too.”
The activities cover geology, ecology, chemistry, constellations and physics. In building the kits, Wylie “tried to pick things that didn’t involve a large amount of supplies and things they could reuse,” she said. For example, the geology activity comes with a magnifying glass, which can be reused by the students for other things.
With the help of “our generous donors and sponsors, we spent just over $2,000,” to make the boxes, she said, so each kit cost “roughly a little over a dollar.” The previous kits were around 50 cents each.
Wylie said each activity is designed to be fun for the students, and to make them ask questions. “Think about a 5- year- old. They ask how things work. As we grow up, we are taught not to ask questions, not to be curious,” she said.
For the geology activity, Wylie said students have to find a rock and examine it with a magnifying glass. Seeing how a rock looks different under a magnifying glass can make that child curious.
“I wonder if bark on a tree looks different?” Wylie said.
The activities are “all designed to be fun, they either involved making a mess, creating something new, or going and looking for something,” Wylie said.
“I think it’s really incredible to give kids the ability to do this. There’s a lot of kids who wouldn’t be able to do this,” Mid-America educator Madeline McCain said. As a geologist, she said it is good “anytime we can expand kids love of science.”
Assembling nearly 2,000 kits took effort. Helping put the kits together were volunteers from Hot Springs Village Rotary who visited the museum around eight times to help finish all the boxes, Wylie said. “They were fantastic. We could not do it without them.”
Wylie started planning the kits around six months ago, and once the materials were at the museum, it took two months to pack all of them.
While Wylie said she didn’t know if the museum would make such a large amount of kits again, she said she would be willing to do this again for other schools.
“Perhaps not this large a number at once, but if the other schools are interested, and we raise money again, I’m absolutely happy to do it again,” she said.