Past Projects
Seeded by STEM CORE
UO Moss St. Children’s Center Kinder Science Program
Chasing Icebergs
Content in Context SuperLessons (C2SL)
Lane County School Slinky Seismometer Project
Establishing a “Science on Demand” Outreach Service at the University of Oregon
By building on current successful UO outreach programs, this outreach service provides science activities, demonstrations, workshops and after-school clubs for K-8 children in Eugene/Springfield and surrounding areas. The Science on Demand (SoD) service recruits and trains undergraduate and graduate students in the sciences and education to act as instructors and informal science curriculum developers. The primary function of the service is to work with area schools to provide children with engaging educational science activities through after-school clubs and classroom visits. The program also serves as a means to provide UO students with pre-service teaching experience and expose them to possible careers teaching science.
PI: Brandy Todd, Director, SPICE Program
The goal of this program is to connect students and teachers who are involved in a series of local environmental monitoring projects to online cartographic tools. Using their own collected environmental data, students in grades 9-12 will learn about the fundamentals of cartography and visualizing spatial data using geographic information systems, specifically ArcGIS Online. Students will learn how collected data are managed and organized, and how to use mapping technology to create informative, aesthetic, easily interpreted visualizations of environmental data. This program also provides the opportunity for UO geography graduate students to teach ArcGIS Online classes, gain classroom experience, and become comfortable interpreting data from unfamiliar fields.
PI: Dean Walton, Science Librarian
UO Moss St. Children’s Center Kinder Science Program
The Kinder Science program will greatly expand and enhance science instruction for 4-6 year old students. The lessons are weekly 1 hour long classroom sessions and includes UO Physics and Chemistry lab field trips. Up to 45 children will participate during regular center hours and at no additional cost to the families. Each session is held by 2 undergraduate science students together with Moss St. teachers using age-appropriate FOSS science curriculum, equipment, and materials. The goals of the program include igniting young children’s interest in science, helping them build confidence, and inspiring them to learn more. Additionally, the program will recruit undergraduate science students to K-12 teaching and provide them with hands-on experience and confidence in working with young children.
PI: Becky Lamoureux, Director at Moss St. Children’s Center
A team of Oregon school district administrators and teachers from Eugene 4J, Bethel, Springfield, Creswell and Crow-Applegate-Lorane districts and industry partners from the local utility company (EWEB), the local city bus system (Lane Transit District), and local automotive mechanic companies (EuroAsian, Stadium and Autohaus), worked with faculty in STEM fields to propose a Title IIb Math and Science Partnership proposal—Lane County Partnership: Content in Context. Awarded by the state of Oregon in June 2012 the funds provide two years of in-service teacher professional development to support research/industry-modeled curricula for grades 5-10. Magnets, Motors and Sensors for students in grades 5-6 teaches students how these are used in everyday life. Green Schools Built for the Extreme for students in grades 9-10 teaches students how to collect and analyze data on the seismic hazards and interior climates within their school buildings. The project-based curriculum culminates with student presentations to school administrators and members of local school boards that show the analytic outcomes and student recommended solutions.
To learn more about the program, please visit here: http://www.stem.lane.edu/
Content in Context SuperLessons
Content in Context SuperLessons (C2SL) is a math and science partnership (MSP, support from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title II-B) teacher professional development program focused on supporting 3rd – 8th grade teachers’ mastery of the new math and science standards (Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards) and implementing them with project-based learning in partnership with STEM professionals. Program staff includes University of Oregon math and science faculty, science and math education specialists from the educational service district, and school district teacher leaders in STEM and technology. The targeted outcomes are (1) elementary and middle school teachers of math and science build skills to develop and implement standards-aligned curricula with integration of content and connections to real-world practice; (2) shared lesson guides—curricula—for implementing projects with rich sets of resources; (3) students increasingly engage in authentic, standards-aligned projects and meet or exceed grade-level benchmarks in math and science. The project is currently in its first of three years; the project aims to include 70 teachers representing all 16 districts in Lane County in order to support wide dissemination of the STEM project-based learning approach.
Astrophysical Explorations for K-12 Students and Teachers
People have a natural curiosity with the sky, which is exactly what this program attempts to expand on as basis for learning STEM principles. Many teachers want to use Astrophysics content to teach STEM standards but don’t have the necessary knowledge base; this program provides an astrophysical expert to provide curriculum guidance and to answer students’ questions. Students are guided to formulate questions, collect, organize, and analyze data based on observations they make in the sky with technologies used to collect and analyze starlight. Students even often engage in engineering design opportunities to design, build, and operate devices that do the aforementioned tasks with light (telescopes, digital cameras, spectroscopes, and even sundials). There are a bevy of math processes, techniques, and concepts involved and some of these concepts are encoded into various web-based simulations that have been developed over the years to support these outreach efforts.
Establishing the OORCC- An Astrophysics Outreach and Research Center within the UO Dept. of Physics
The goal of the OORCC (Oregon Observatory Remote Control Center) is to serve as a bridge between the world of professional science and our local efforts in the areas of undergraduate research, K-12 development, and a multi-faceted outreach effort. An emphasis on UO undergraduate involvement through PI Fisher’s ASTR and PHYS classes, combined with public observing sessions and visits from other UO outreach programs and legitimate research for UO faculty and students, will bring significant exposure to the Physics department and to astrophysical general education.
PI: Scott R. Fisher, UO Physics Department
Lane County School Slinky Seismometer Project
The LCSSS will build a sustainable network of four slinky seismometers in Lane County high schools, capable of recording signals from M6 and greater earthquakes occurring worldwide. The collected data is automatically recorded to the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Data Management Center (DMC) to be made public. The seismometers themselves are made semi-publicly visible via kiosks in partner schools that students construct to share their work and to educate other students. The primary focus is to introduce high school students to data acquisition in an earth sciences context and set up future opportunities for learning with data analysis.
PIs: Doug Toomey, UO Geological Sciences; Dean Livelybrooks, UO Physics; Kim Finch, Eugene 4J
The “Fundamentals of Rocketry” project aims to develop a rocketry training program for local students. Project members will design rockets using computer assisted design (CAD) and 3D printing technology, test replicate flights of them, record flight data, statistically analyze data, and keep a journal/diary/field notebook of testing and design issues. Students will understand how alterations to a rocket change the rocket’s performance and how collecting replicate data is important for statistical analysis. Rocketry is an exciting hobby that lends itself to further investigation in not only the basics of Newtonian physics but also in the involvement of students with new technologies such as altimeter/barometer implementation and GPS/Radio tracking of rockets.
PI: Dean Walton, UO Science Librarian
Opportunities STEM Outreach
“Our STEM CORE Collaborative Initiative grant funded important components of our outreach in academic year 2013-14. It included a workshop titled “Introduction to STEM” at eight of our Opportunities events in the community. It also included two workshops at the Capstone event on May 10 at the University of Oregon Campus titled Lights and Waves and Chemical Reactions. We had approximately 300 attendees participate in the workshops combined. We have two remaining projects being partially funded by this grant: an outreach video and a publication that feature students are expected to be completed in the fall term 2014.”
PI: Antonio Huerta, Ellen McWhirter
STEM Lab School Project
The STEM Lab School serves as a model of best practices in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, and actively train teachers across the district, region and state. Teams of Arts and Technology Academy teachers composed of science, math, and English/language arts teachers at each grade level (6-8) are partnered with University of Oregon (UO) research faculty and graduate students to share and develop ideas for introducing current science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) into project-based lessons that span disciplinary areas.
Read more in the news: http://around.uoregon.edu/content/uo-science-and-math-program-holds-k-12-teacher-workshops