PHOTOS/ Claire Denne & Abby Pan “The sixth graders seemed really thrilled about our experiments and I was happy to teach them about chemistry,” sophomore Donovan Tang said. “I got to revisit my old teachers and look back at how far I’ve come since I was young. It brought back memories from when other high schoolers visited us back in elementary school.”
By Claire Denne,
Newsletter Editor
The AP Chemistry and AP Physics students presented hands-on experiments to Emperor elementary students on May 26. They will also go to Longden on June 2 to promote an interest in science. AP teachers often struggle to fill the four to five-week period between AP tests and finals week after covering their curriculum.
The project started during one of AP Physics teacher Kevin Slattery’s first years of teaching at TCHS. Slattery designed the project, inspired by his wife, to challenge students on how to teach and illustrate a scientific topic with an experiment to students. Since then, AP Chemistry teacher Debbie Gewecke also assigned the project to her students.
“We’re basing this off of one of the labs that we did during the school year about intermolecular forces and chromatography,” junior Helen Yu said. “In class we used food dye, but food dye is messy and they’re third graders, so we’re using markers instead because they’re way cleaner.”
AP Chemistry students started working on their project on May 3, and AP Physics students started on May 13, the day after their respective AP exams. Both classes brainstormed ideas, submitted them for approval and practiced their projects until they were ready to present to the elementary students. The project challenges the high school students to make their own interests understandable for younger students, as some of the concepts are too complicated for the elementary level.
On these days, participating students bring materials to the elementary schools, where each group presents their experiment to their assigned class.
One of the groups, seniors Stephanie Lee, Elaine Shu, Jenny Chen and Crystal Doan, taught second-grade Emperor students about structure by having them construct a marshmallow tower. Originally, they hoped to make chromatography flowers, but switched to marshmallow towers to challenge creativity and logic.
When preparing for their experiment, the group realized that their original plan didn’t allot sufficient time nor materials for an effective marshmallow tower. To revise, they added more opportunities that would still be a challenge for the students, while also allowing enough time.
“It’s more the experience that the elementary school kids will have, because I think they look up to the bigger kids and get excited about science,” Slattery said. “And after doing it, a year or two, just seeing the excitement that the kids have, and the fact that most of the high school students really enjoy it made it more fun.”