Education Exchange
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"Correspondence School": Inspiring a Future Generation of Scientists with Science-By-Mail I've always liked to write letters, and like most people, I like to receive letters even more. So when I heard about an innovative science education project called Science-By-Mail (SBM) that links groups of children across the nation with scientist pen pals, I signed up immediately. I have now served three years as a volunteer scientist with the program, which is coordinated through the Museum of Science in Boston. SBM's dual intent is to provide highquality materials to supplement school science instruction and to introduce children early in their lives to enthusiastic "real" scientists. SBM works like this: Children register for memberships either through school programs, in family groups, or individually. The children are then mailed science challenge packets, each with a story line incorporated into an instruction book and with all the materials needed to perform a set of experiments. Once the children work through the project, they send their results and thoughts to their pen pal scientist. The scientists, who are recruited by SBM and each assigned to five memberships, read through the results and then return a letter commenting, adding ideas, or just saying "good job!" Each year, Science-By-Mail produces three new science challenge packets covering a range of topics. This year's pack. ets focus on structures, sound, and time. The story line for the structures packet tells about three children—Rosie, Sandra and Max—who accidentally activate an incredible shrinking machine, which leaves them only four inches tall. In order to return to full size, they have to build a tower which will support them as they climb to the reverse switch. Along with the protagonists, the children build a tower out of straws and paper clips. In the process, they try different building designs that increase the strength of the tower, such as widening the base or adding cross-beams. The story characters next need a stronger tower to reach the top of the machine, so the children are asked to build a tower out of index cards and compare its strength to that of the straw tower. They learn that each building material has different properties (straws are good for height, cards for support) and that you maximize these characteristics depending on the purpose of the structure to be built. The final challenge, in which the students build a freestanding bridge 20 inch-
es long, gets them to work with a structure based on triangular trusses, one of the strongest structural components in architecture. The children have already discovered the strength of the triangle from the cross-beams in their tower, so they can now assimilate the complicated idea of a truss that balances the forces of tension and compression. The children are asked to draw blueprints of their bridges, so that they learn both about making diagrams of structures and about measurement. And in a very important concession to reality, they are also asked to calculate the cost of building their
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