This outreach Core aims to enhance and expand upon Fall into Science, a K-12 outreach program established by the Director, Dr. David Lin. Fall into Science began in 2013 to give graduate students a chance to share their love of science with K-12 students.
Founded on a shoestring budget and now supported as an NIH-supported Core, Fall into Science graduate students have worked with more than 2300 area K-12 students since its inception. With this funding, we can recruit students from other graduate fields on campus, enabling us to expand our ongoing outreach activities and develop new programming. Furthermore, we leverage funding for the Core by working with existing groups on campus with established records of performing K-12 outreach.
Activities include building robots with 4th graders, learning cell biology by ‘shrinking’ 7th and 8th graders down to the size of a cell, teaching fundamentals of molecular biology by giving students different ‘superpowers’ based on a given mutation, showing how scientists respond to a pandemic and how viruses can spread, baking cookies with different ratios of ingredients to demonstrate the power of chemistry, showing how polymers form and are part of our everyday life, and teaching the fundamentals of coding.
Ninth-grade students learn reproductive principles through interactions with animals at the Cornell veterinary open house and see how beetles can exploit evolutionary niches through guided animations. Tenth through twelfth-grade students perform experiments in the lab, and with the help of faculty, have submitted a manuscript describing their results.
More than 60 graduate students in the life sciences at Cornell are part of Fall into Science!
If you’re interested in more information or would like to explore the possibility of integrating Fall Into Science in your classroom, please contact Dr. Lin’s administrative assistant, Anya Samiljan, at as3538@cornell.edu.
