Science Outreach with Grade 7 and 8 students

Project partner: Thousand Islands Elementary School

Project Description

The Ontario Ministry of Education has set out specific learning outcomes for grades one to twelve in its curriculum. Many grade 7 and 8 teachers find it difficult to design experiments to teach science. Additionally, funding levels in schools are such that most cannot afford to purchase science kits from manufacturers.

Several experimentation projects have been designed by first year engineering students to focus on various aspects of the science curriculum. Past projects have included units to teach optics, motion, hydraulics and heat.

The following apparatus was constructed by a team of first year engineering students to demonstrate fluid motion to students:

The outcome of the optics project was featured in a November 2005 issue of the Gananoque Reporter:

The APSC100 students working on this project chose to build models of the eyeball and a camera to demonstrate optics to Grade 8 students. They also created a lesson plan and a website to follow the curriculum set out by the Ministry of Education. The following are the original eyeball (left) and camera (right) designs created by the students.

Lisa Chitty, a Grade 8 teacher at Thousand Islands Elementary School was very pleased with the outcome of the learning activities APSC 100 students had developed for her classroom:

"I am very impressed by the level of hands-on participation that my students were able to experience. These labs provide a broader range of thinking that is inhibited by the lack of resources and materials at elementary school levels. If experiments like these were used in all grades, I believe that our students’ understanding of the curriculum and their excitement towards learning science would be heightened. Thank you on behalf of my students for such a valuable learning experience. We had fun while learning a curriculum that is already overloaded and dense."