What is a Science Team?
A Science Team is a group (optimally 2 to 4, but sometimes 1 and sometimes as many as 8), of physics students who practice what they have learned on a third grade class (which they adopt) every two weeks for a whole year.
What are the rules?
No magic show. Every demonstration and activity must have an explanation that is as accurate as they can possible make it and understandable to third graders.
What evidence must be produced?
A journal describing what they plan to do, what they did and how it went, what they would do different next time. pictures are a good addition.
How do they get started?
First choice is that they choose their own third grade teacher, make their own contacts, and plan a schedule with that teacher. Otherwise, I will do it for them.
What do they do?
Here is a partial list of activities/topics, along with brief descriptions of them.
How does it turn out? Have a look.
Observations.
Even the worst teams do a great job. That's because their primary job is to sell physics not teach it. In fact, overall, the best science teamers are not always the best physics students.
Science teamers with a crude explanation do better job teaching a
topic than either their teacher or I do even though our presentation
may be more polished and accurate. (That is pretty much a quote from
one of our third grade teachers.) Why? Who knows? Science teamers are
hot!
How effective are they? I don't know for sure. One of the reasons I'd
like to get more teachers involved is to actually do a formal study
of their effectiveness. However, I do have dozens of cards and
letters from third graders and their teachers exclaiming how much
different science appears after having a science team, plus the
following:
In the spring of 2000 I was invited to an electronics workshop conducted by a group of Auburn electrical engineering students at Radney Elementary. Of the 24 students chosen to participate, (out of a total of 300 sixth graders) by the teachers because they were judged to be the top 24 students in science in the sixth grade, 20 came from our first science team's adopted third grade class. That could be a coincidence, but I'd sure like to find out.
What do I want?
I want to do a workshop for physics teachers and do something to entice them to come, like offer them a stipend to come to a one day (or maybe two) workshop and participate in the program for two years. (That is all it should take to give them the experience necessary to continue thereafter with so little effort that hopefully they would do it for free.) We'd need funds to finance the programs for two years. Materials, (the box of goodies costs $40, shirts cost approximately $30, and each school should ideally muster at least two teams of four, and preferably three, and I'd like some sort of stipend or scholarship for science teamers, perhaps $500 for a semester or a year. Ideally, I'd like for local merchants and businesses to sponsor team members or whole teams, or some sort of perpetuation mechanism. Science teamers have too much to do to be raising money for their own existence.