SCIENCE EDUCATION NEWS / GRANTS IN ACTION RESEARCH NEWS GRANT ANNOUNCEMENTS SCIENCE EDUCATION NEWS INSTITUTE NEWS ... HHMI HOME ALSO OF INTEREST University of Cincinnati College of Medicine Saturday Science Academy HHMI Precollege Science Education Grants Download this story in Acrobat PDF format. (requires Acrobat Reader Science Is a Family Affair Sometimes Saturday science includes mock surgery on a foam stomach. It's Saturday morning in Cincinnati. Most teenagers are probably sleeping in, talking on the phone or heading for the mall. Most moms are working, shopping or cleaning house. Lauren Gendrew, 13, and her mother, Gwen Gendrew, are separating plant pigments using thin-layer chromatography, as are Rebecca Ransohoff, 12, and her mother, Cindy Ransohoff. One lab explores the science of color. The Saturday scientists apply a mixture of concentrated pigments extracted from a variety of plants to a thin-layer chromatography strip, a plastic strip coated with silica gel. When a strip is dipped in a mixture of acetone, alcohol and ether, the pigments move up it by capillary action, the same way plants move water from their roots up to their leaves. The teams of students and adults also study bioluminescence, replicating in a test tube the light produced by fireflies, all under the guiding hands of Lance Barton, Ben Wilkins and Lyndsay Schaeffer, graduate student teaching assistants. The intervention seems to be working. In a city school system where only about one out of four students completes high school, the graduation rate for Saturday Science Academy students since 1994 exceeds 90 percent. | |
|