Eighth Grade Science Class Visit at McDevitt Middle School
Creators: name: Lemos, Tania
name: Scalera, Amy
name: Rodal, Avital
name: Delsignore, Steve
name: Ermanoska, Biljana
name: Blanchette, Cassandra
name: Marchan, Frankie
name: Zhao, Troy
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2019
Subjects: subject: Cell Biology
subject: Genetics
subject: FOS: Biological sciences
subject: FOS: Biological sciences
subject: Neuroscience

description: Members of our lab visited a local middle school for one day and worked with all of the eighth grade science classes. Our visit to the eighth graders happened in three parts. PART ONE: Two weeks before our scheduled visit, I dropped off vials of flies so that the students could watch the progression of their life cycle from egg laying adults to larvae, pupae, and F1 adults. PART TWO: I made a simple video with my phone to give the students a tour around our lab. The idea was to show them what a lab looks like and give them a rough idea of the work that goes into doing a typical experiment for our lab. It was a one take, first person journey where I walked around the lab from the incubators where we keep all our stocks, to the fly bench where Cassie was dissecting a larva, to the microscope room where Amy was imaging a dissected larval fillet. In my narration I tried to help them follow the steps of the experiment and also give them a little background about the science behind the experiments. The students watched the video the week before we visited and they submitted 1 question each using a google form. Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=echcj1YHONo PART THREE: Eight of us visited the middle school: an undergrad, a tech, a lab manager, a grad student, three postdocs, and a PI. We got there an hour before classes started to setup the same 4 experimental stations* in two separate rooms. We also divided ourselves, 4 lab members per room, as these sessions would be taught in parallel. Each class lasted ~55 minutes, and we divided this time into two phases. For the first part, we were talking to the students for about 20 minutes and for the second part, the students had ~7 minutes at each of the 4 experimental stations. In our presentation portion we began with a brief overview of what we study and why we study it. Then each of the four lab members introduced themselves and their personal science journey (where she was from, how she got interested in science, etc.) to show that there are all kinds of ways to get to a job in science regardless of background, culture, sex, economic status, etc. Before the students broke into groups for the experimental stations, I gave a quick primer in why we use flies to study human bodies and diseases, and I also answered some questions the students had submitted after watching the video. *Our four experimental stations were supposed to be: 1) Scientist dissection demo (one room gets the scope with the camera so the kids can watch on the laptop, one room will be taking turns watching on a regular dissecting scope) 2)TDP43 crawling and climbing assay (kids can observe the differences between TDP43 and WT crawling and climbing phenotypes) 3)General fly behavior (a couple flies in a petri dish sealed with parafilm, we can talk about range of complex behaviors and how flies can be used for research into human bodies and diseases) 4) Play cool movies on loops, show cool images, or videos showing dissections and chat about them. However, on the day before the visit, the crosses we had setup up for station 2 were not expressing the expected phenotypes, so we scrapped that and instead brought a recycling heated water bath and had the kids observe and compare the temperature sensitive seizure phenotype of our nwk mutant flies with WT flies. THEN, we arrived at the classroom and were setting up, we discovered that one of the water baths wasn't working, so we improvised AGAIN and one room had TWO different stations where lab members were presenting their own data and experiments. While we didn't capture and hold all the students' attention (unrealistic), I found that the kids were mostly quiet while we were talking, and many asked questions and were curious about all kinds of aspects of our visit. In 4 hours of instruction, I only had to ask a couple kids to be quiet twice. My experimental station was me and my laptop, walking them through an experiment I had to design myself. I showed them how I figured out how to prepare and perform live imaging of the sensory neurons through the body wall of an anesthetized, undissected larva. I walked them through my mental process, the mistakes I made, and how I tried to work through them to find solutions that worked. Then I showed them some characteristic images from the data set and explained how these results set us up to ask more questions and do more experiments. If we had to distill our visit into a single message it would be, "science and curiosity are for everyone. Anyone can be a scientist. Or one can choose not to be a scientist but still enjoy science and asking questions." I think we communicated that well. After the visit, we got this email from one of the science teachers: "We at McDevitt are very lucky to have worked with you and your team. The students really enjoyed having you in our classroom on Monday. I have worked with other scientist throughout this PD and I personally feel that your team is perfect for this type of work. You guys made it so easy to develop plans through emails and visits. We worked together and were able to create a day that was engaging and memorable for the students. Not only was your team amazing to collaborate with but the students felt that you all are easy to relate to. Students felt very comfortable to explore, play, dissect and ask many questions. I think this experience really did help us reach the objective of showing students that "ANYONE can be a scientist!" Other teachers in the building came by to tell me how the students were so excited and were enthusiastically telling them about this experience. On Wednesday we had a curriculum night were parents came in. I had many parents tell me how happy they are that their child got to experience this great opportunity."