We have developed a volunteer program designed to enhance physical science education within elementary schools in the metropolitan Atlanta area. This community outreach has been in direct response to feedback from Atlanta schools citing physical science as the primary weakness within the elementary curricula. Developing an understanding of physical science at a young age is fundamental to building the talents of potential engineers. Such understanding is inhibited not only by the relative complexity of the physical sciences as compared to other elementary subjects but also by the fact that many elementary teachers themselves often do not have the education or confidence in these concepts to teach them effectively.Elementary Science for Elementary Students (ES~2) brings demonstrations into the classroom that teach fundamental concepts in electricity, machines, structures, and sound. Each demonstration has the same basic format, beginning with a brief interactive lecture and visually-based demonstration that emphasizes at most two fundamental concepts and ending with a hands-on activity that allows students to experiment with these concepts. This format is a particularly effective teaching method, because it combines the three major learning techniques (visual, auditory, tactile) into a single presentation. In this way, each child is able to learn the concepts in their most natural mode of learning, reinforced by the two remaining modes. The hands-on activities are especially helpful in establishing the link between engineering and science, encouraging both boys and girls to tinker and determine how things work. It is not only the students, but also the teachers that gain a better understanding of science through our demonstrations, improving their confidence in the material which enables them to teach more effectively in the future.ES~2 has two fundamental phases of growth and outreach. In the first phase, our volunteers go into the classrooms and do physical science demonstrations themselves. Once we have gained familiarity and trust in the schools, however, we seek to maximize our educational impact inelementary school curricula by providing demonstration materials to the individual schools and training teachers to do these demonstrations independently.
展开▼
