Carlsbad K-12 “Science Days” Are Fostering the Next Generation of Innovators

Every year, this Southern California community comes together to make science fun.

 

For nearly a decade, the Carlsbad Unified School District (CUSD) has held its annual “Science Day” events across grade levels in collaboration with local nonprofit Carlsbad Educational Foundation and Thermo Fisher Scientific, a global life science research company whose Carlsbad campus is buzzing with more than 2,200 employees daily.

CUSD serves more than 10,000 K-12 students across cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in southern California. The public district encompasses nine elementary schools, three middle schools, two high schools, and two alternative schools.

Each year, Thermo Fisher connects CUSD with more than 100 staff volunteers, plus supplies and funding to help make events like Science Day possible.

“We use science and engineering practices to create a day of hands-on activities involving techniques that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to do in the classroom because of the cost of the consumable items and materials,” said CUSD K-12 Science Specialist Ashley Crawford.

Science Day is one of the most-attended days of the school year. Students, teachers, parents, and Thermo Fisher volunteer team members gather to participate in immersive, age-appropriate science activities that encourage learning, career exploration and – perhaps key to it all – having fun.

For CUSD, having a Fortune 100 global science leader in their own backyard is a boon for bringing real-life, hands-on experience to the classroom well before college. It’s a rare luxury in a country still facing the challenge of STEM deserts, areas where students lack access to high-quality science education resources.

According to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 30% of US fourth graders and 42% of eighth graders participate in scientific inquiry-related classroom activities either never or only once or twice per year. Likewise, 41% of twelfth-grade students perform below NAEP Basic grade-level proficiency standards in science.

 “It’s important to reach students at all grade levels and especially in underserved communities,” said Carlsbad Educational Foundation Director of Programs Jamie Rowan. “Research suggests that if you wait too long to engage, you may miss a window of opportunity. If you can get kids engaged in science at a young age, especially underserved students and girls, they can see themselves in it and latch onto it for the long term.”

In Carlsbad, CUSD educators and partners like Thermo Fisher are determined to make the most of their geographic connection by engaging local students with STEM early and often.

Showcasing creative expression through science

Inside Thermo Fisher’s sprawling 600,000 square foot Carlsbad site are state-of-the-art manufacturing systems, R&D wet labs, and offices, and cross-disciplinary experts working to bring innovative tools and services to scientists around the world.

Tools like the Gibco CTS Xenon Electroporation System, an instrument that researchers in Carlsbad, Singapore, and beyond worked overtime through the pandemic to build so that cancer researchers and biotech manufacturers could have a better way to construct personalized cell therapies for patients. Team members developed the technology from cardboard prototype to fine-tuned machine, often making progress via twilight-hour video calls between time zones due to lockdown restrictions on face-to-face meetings.

At the K-12 level, scientific innovation looks more like smashing a sandwich bag of strawberries in your hands and extracting visible clumps of DNA with a salty soap mixture; or cracking open a geode to examine its colorful crystalline insides; or pretending the floor is lava and engineering a way to save a family of counting bears from certain doom by keeping them off the ground.

These activities are enduring classroom hits. But they are also, the school hopes, seeds for growing future Xenon inventors, cell culture specialists, and beyond.

To experts like Crawford, it’s important to demonstrate to students that a “scientist” doesn’t look or act like any one thing. There are multiple pathways to learning, and every student can find an opportunity to engage with STEM ideas.

 “We want to celebrate students’ creativity and their own background knowledge and cultural connections. As a result, a lot of our Science Day activities are rooted in the students being creative with how they want to present their information,” said Crawford.

“We’re big on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework where students can use different ways to articulate their knowledge base and showcase their learning. We’ll ask, Do you want to draw a picture about it? Do you want to build a model? Do you want to write about it?”

“We sometimes give them plastic building blocks and ask them to build something open-ended, with no right or wrong answer,” she said. “We always want to give them multiple means of expression.”

Giving students the tools to learn

No matter how students might choose to express their learnings on Science Day, CUSD and Thermo Fisher want to make sure they get a true-to-life glimpse into life science. That can mean prioritizing the equipment as much as the experiment.

For young learners, encountering even basic scientific tools like electrophoresis machines or micropipettes can have a profound impact.

Volunteer Paul Marvyn De Jesus, a training center manager at Thermo Fisher, is one of many who did not handle resources like pipettes and instruments until college level studies. Even today, around 20% of US eighth graders have little or no access to scientific instruments or supplies for labs and demonstrations.

De Jesus co-leads the Thermo Fisher Carlsbad site’s Family Support Business Resource Group, which helps recruit colleague volunteers for Science Days. Volunteers demonstrate technology use to the students, but mastering these tools is not the point.

 “Students may not remember all the facts correctly, or the technical details of the experiments we’re running with them,” said De Jesus. “But it’s about creating memories. And it’s the same for the volunteers. It’s so fulfilling for us to be involved in this.”

One middle school activity involves using an E-Gel™ iBase Power System, a tablet-sized modernization of the traditional gel setup involving a wet tank, electrical power supply, wires, and potentially toxic substances.

Electrophoresis E-Gel systems like the iBase have been designed to streamline the multi-step process of DNA sample analysis and imaging and eliminate the need for gel pouring with hazardous ethidium bromide. The ease-of-use, safety features, and built-in visualization also make it an ideal tool for hands-on demonstrations with K-12 students.

A technical genetics lesson is wrapped up in a story, about a bite taken from the science teacher’s cookie while she stepped away from her lunch. The students are given a simple lineup of “volunteer DNA sample profiles” to compare with the thief’s sample and tasked with finding the culprit.

“There’s sort of an ‘aha’ moment when they actually press the button on the instrument to run a gel and see that they can visualize the DNA they were just working with and now know who the culprit is, who ate the cookie,” said De Jesus.

Active learning makes memories

For a professional scientist, running DNA analysis is a rote, everyday task that they may be glad to automate. For a 12-year-old in the classroom, it’s a transformative moment.

 “I’ve heard from so many kids that this was the best moment of their lives, and that’s what you want to hear. Unique hands-on experiences are special. They solidify that magic behind science and engineering,” said Crawford.

The research backs it up; compared to passive instruction methods like lecturing, active learning increases student performance across subjects – particularly in STEM. In a recent education policy review published in Science, authors Hirsh-Pasek and Michnick Golinkoff  argue that students learn best when they are active and engaged, when material is meaningful or related to the outside world, and when activities are socially interactive.

“We want students to understand what you can do with science. It’s not just a memorization of facts, but problem solving and critical thinking,” Crawford said.

Jennifer Mendez, a senior staff program manager at Thermo Fisher, has led much of the Science Day coordination from the Thermo Fisher side.  To her, the benefits of active STEM learning are palpable.

“We sometimes do an airplane design activity in elementary school classrooms,” said Mendez. “When the students figure out how to work together and find the most efficient way to build an airplane, you can feel the energy in the room escalate. You step in cold to the classroom, but by the end of the day everyone feels like they’ve beaten the challenge and achieved a collective accomplishment.”

STEM is for everyone

Even with the best science education, not every student will choose a career path in science. That’s both normal and expected. Science Days are designed to provide benefit far beyond the STEM field.

“Science Day activities transcend science,” said Crawford. “We’ll start a conversation with students about the manufacturing of items they use every day. Manufacturing involves teamwork and precision along with science. These days are about how we can get our students to be critical thinkers in their world.”

After all, it takes all types of thinkers to keep a global life science company like Thermo Fisher running smoothly.

While Carlsbad is a relatively science-minded community – with many CUSD parents working in STEM-based organizations around the region – they’re not all scientists.

 “We’ve had volunteers from various roles such as HR, finance, and IT,” said Mendez. “It’s not just bench scientists supporting this.”

Thermo Fisher recently organized a career panel with Carlsbad High School, with professionals from all different walks of life and professional roles.

 “When thinking about a scientific company like Thermo Fisher Scientific, students may automatically believe that you need to be a scientist to work there,” Crawford said. “The career panel helps students understand that there are actually many jobs – marketing, writing, accounting, and so many more.”

Thermo Fisher volunteers try to challenge student preconceptions by being transparent about the often winding paths of their careers.

“The employees on the panel were great about sharing things they discovered through their career paths,” said Crawford. “They’d say, ‘I didn’t know that I was really going to like this field’ or ‘I changed my mind about what I wanted to do in college or halfway through my career.’ Or they’d share a life experience like, ‘I was actually a history major in college, but now I work in R&D.’ It gives the students a well-rounded view of reality and what is possible,” she said.

The collaboration truly is a two-way street, and therein lies its strength. Students, parents, teachers, and employees share in the excitement of Science Day, and increasingly recognize the benefit of growing together as one cohesive STEM-informed, intergenerational community.

According to Crawford, “the teachers also opened it up for the Thermo Fisher employee volunteers to ask questions of the students. Things like, ‘what is it like to be in high school in 2024?’ And that exchange of ideas and support between the two groups was really fun.”

From here, Science Day will only grow, much like the student scholars themselves.

CUSD and partners would like to expand high school career connections even further and bring middle school STEM programming into a cross-disciplinary space – meaning that a student might do a science activity in their English class.

“At the end of the day we want students to connect their interests now with careers later,” said Crawford. Our goal is to prepare global citizens that can be creative, collaborative problem-solvers.”

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