High school students at USCience Day watched as a chemical reaction created smog in the lab.
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Explosive Learning
Trojan Chemistry Club sponsors annual open house for high school students
By Kirsten Holguin
On a Saturday last February, a chorus of oohs and aahs filled the chemistry labs and lecture halls of USC.
The exclamations were triggered by a display of fireworks and other
chemical reactions engineered by members of the USC Trojan Chemistry
Club for the 200 Los Angeles-area high school students and their
teachers attending this year’s USCience Day.
For nearly 20 years, the Trojan Chemistry Club has hosted USCience Day,
an event designed to excite high school students about science. It is
yet another way that USC College reaches outside of campus boundaries
to build strong ties with the community. “Our hope with USCience Day is
that students who are about to enter college see scientific careers as
an opportunity,” said USC College junior Erin Morrison, president of
the chemistry club.
“Having more Americans take science classes raises the country’s
ability to compete with other nations in production,” she said,
referring to the growing concern that the U.S. is losing ground in its
global competitiveness. That concern has led President Bush to say that
there is a crisis in K-12 math and science education in the U.S.
There was no dearth of enthusiasm for science at USCience Day: The
attendees’ amazement of seeing fireworks as well as smog was quickly
followed with a rush of questions such as, “How did you do that?”
Some students saw a working chemistry lab for the first time.
“We don’t really have a lot of equipment,” said Nitta Song, a chemistry
and biology teacher at Whitney High School in Cerritos. “The students
don’t get exposed to the experiments that they had a chance to see
today.”
Gene Bickers, professor of physics and astronomy, and USC students led
demonstrations showing voltage, wave length, air pressure, inertia and
torque force.
Afterward, Calvin Cheng, an 11th grader at Whitney High, spoke with
Bickers. Although Cheng has not decided what to study in college, he
said USCience Day provided a valuable opportunity for high school
students to explore their options.
The visitors also attended lectures by Bickers, Lawford Anderson,
professor of earth sciences, and Chi Mak, professor of chemistry.
Loud groans and raucous cheering could be heard during Mak’s lecture,
in which he introduced students to the remote control-like “clickers”
of the Personal Response System (PRS). Students used the clickers to
answer multiple-choice questions anonymously, and reacted to the
results instantly displayed on a computer projection.
“When you have the system, students can actually voice what they are
thinking without having the embarrassment of being found out that they
got the wrong answer. It really does allow you to read their minds in
real time,” said Mak.
Julie Patton, from Crescenta Valley High School, has been bringing her
AP chemistry students to the event for the last five years. She hopes
to encourage more students to go into science education, where she sees
a big need. Patton, who has a B.S. in chemistry, went into teaching
after seven years in the computer and financial fields.
A 1985 USC chemical engineering graduate, Myriam Telles, teaches earth
science and chemistry at Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach.
She came by herself but, excited by what she saw, hopes to raise the
money to bring her students next year.
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