SEATTLE - Have bus, will teach and travel.
This is the inaugural week for Seattle Children's mobile Science Adventure Lab - a fully stocked science laboratory driven by PhDs with trucker licenses to schools across the state.
The $600,000 mobile lab was built entirely with donations and will visit up to 5,000 Washington state students, ranging from 4th to 8 th grade, every year.
The very first students to enter the mobile lab were Ms. Liverman's 5 th graders at Seattle's Northgate Elementary School. With wide eyes and open minds, the students looked at the gleaming lab in awe.
Dr. Amanda Jones is the director of Seattle Children's Science Education Program. She has four lesson plans teachers can choose from when the mobile lab pulls up to their school, complete with experiments that teach kids about topics ranging from nutrition, to asthma, to infectious diseases.
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Jones says teaching 4th through 8th graders is every bit as exciting as the experiments she spent a dozen years conducting inside Children's laboratories.
"If we can inspire a few kids to realize that science is achievable for them" she said, "that it's fun and there's a lot of career options, then it's very fulfilling."
Her lesson for the day had the students scraping cells off their own cheeks. Using pipettes, heat blocks, and other equipment not generally found in elementary school classrooms, the students got a glimpse of their own DNA. Fifth grader Tajon Williams was impressed.
"My favorite part was seeing my DNA," he said, "because I've never seen an actual DNA before!"
Others agreed, calling the experiments "fun" and "cool". Their teacher, Stacy Liverman, said the experience will have countless benefits inside classrooms both in the near and distant future.
"Even that little boost of 'I've seen that. I know what it's called. I've used it before' is going to make a difference," she said. "Even though they don't know it now, but they will."
The Science Adventure Lab will travel from Washington's largest urban schools to the state's most remote areas to teach children. It is mostly booked for this school year, but every effort will be made to visit schools whose teachers or principals request a visit.
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