Tucked in a classroom at UC Santa Barbara, Ander Chambers spent his Friday morning building a makeshift rollercoaster using painter’s tape, parts of pool noodles and glass marbles.
“We have a lot of twists and a lot of areas where it’s not flat,” he said, pointing to his creation on the wall.
Chambers, who just graduated from the seventh grade, is one of the dozens of students who participated in SciTrek this summer, a science outreach program for elementary and middle school students.
For around 15 years, SciTrek has led one-week lessons on topics including physics, biology, conservation of mass, fermentation and cellular respiration, said Kim Ciancio, the program’s academic coordinator. She said the program partners with UCSB’s Department of Recreation summer camp.
SciTrek is funded by a nearly $1 million grant secured by Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara, who graduated from UC Santa Barbara.
This week, the program focused on physics concepts. On the first day of the module, the kids learned about how factors such as friction and height affect motion, Ciancio said. Then, they designed their own experiments, made a hypothesis and created a data table.
The goal of the program, Ciancio said, is to allow the kids to think for themselves.
“We do want them to learn the science,” she said. “But what we really want to do is create thinkers.”
SciTrek is experiment-based, allowing participants to think critically and find solutions, Ciancio said.
“It’s making an impact with students in our community by helping them understand the idea that you don’t have to have all the answers,” she said. “It’s okay to want an answer, and there’s a way to find that answer.”
During the SciTrek session on Friday, the students were split up into groups from around 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Volunteers for SciTrek—about seven UCSB students—roamed around the classroom as the kids used tables, chairs and cabinets to prop up their do-it-yourself rollercoasters.
Kids presented their rollercoasters at the end of the session, giving their inventions names such as “The five second ride of chaos” and “Tons of tape.”
Alexander Harris, who has been a volunteer for SciTrek for three years, said the volunteers are mostly hands-off to teach the kids about independent problem solving.
Despite his role as a mentor, he said he has learned much from the children himself. Harris, an aspiring mathematics teacher, said SciTrek affirmed his passion for being in the classroom.
The program’s hands-on nature makes it different from other volunteer programs at the university, said Harris, an incoming fourth-year mathematics student at UCSB.
“It’s a good lesson that science can be fun as well,” he said.
Edelle Cardenas, who attended the SciTrek session on Friday, said she is interested in exploring physics in the future.
“I like the idea of building things first-hand,” she said. “It sounds fun.”
