Science with Toys

At one of the initial ScienceQuest sessions, the High Point coach handed each team member small toys including magnetic marbles, magnifying glasses, and prism slides. The coach invited the youth participants to examine each object, play with it to learn how it worked, and then describe what they found to the others. The team members then asked themselves, "What more do I want to know?" The assistant coaches kept track of the team's ideas on a poster board hanging on the wall. Before the session ended, team members recorded in their journals what they had learned and what more they wanted to know.

The Ten Minute Field Trip

In another immersion activity, the kids went outside in the late New England spring snow in search of signs of animal life in the just-thawed ground around their neighborhood. Before the walk, they had posed the following questions: How do animals spend the winter? What do they do when the weather warms up and the snow melts? Each team member recorded his or her questions on a sheet prepared by the coaches. During the walk, they took notes on their observations, including both those observations that addressed their questions as well as observations that led to other questions.

At Home Scientists

At Castle Square, the coach used the immersion period to expose the kids to home-based science experiments. For the first four weeks, he brought in different materials with which to carry out experiments. One day he brought in a hair dryer and a ping-pong ball, and the kids looked at the relationship between gravity and friction. Another day he brought in K'nex and the kids designed complex structures, focusing on aspects of engineering design. After doing the experiment, the kids sometimes went to the Internet to learn more about the phenomenon they were looking at. Their immersion stage focused on doing and reading.