STEM Day at Brown brings science to life for local high schoolers – Brown University

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Hundreds of local high schoolers were immersed in the world of science as they participated in this year’s STEM Day at Brown.

The annual event serves as a gateway for high school students to explore the core principles of science while also offering a snapshot of academic and student life on a college campus. This year’s event took place on a cold late-March morning and included more than 200 students from five high schools across Rhode Island.

Just after 9 a.m., the high schoolers jumped off a fleet of yellow school buses ready for hands-on workshops and thoughtful discussions about what it’s like being a scientist in STEM. Broken up into groups, students spent the bulk of the day interacting with Brown faculty and students, and taking part in 12 science sessions that unfolded simultaneously across various classrooms and laboratories on College Hill.

Each session was structured as mini-lessons — a brief lecture at the start and then a hands-on portion where students got to apply their new insights, seeing what they learned in action and making connections to how the concepts play out in the real world.

“It helped me see that [science] relates to everything,” said 10th grader Cindy Pagan after taking part in a session about gel-like biopolymers. Along with classmates from Central High School in Providence, Pagan learned about the chemical reaction it takes to create these kinds of gels. In this case, the students saw that squishy gel forms when alginic acid is mixed into a calcium ion solution.

“I’d seen something like it in cooking shows, so it got me thinking how science is related to cooking and then beyond that,” Pagan said.

For other students, seeing the chemical reaction was a first. Jaws fell to the floor when the bright green gel formed. Circled around a long table topped with beakers of the mixture, one student declared, “I’m not touching that!” All it took was one student reaching his hand into the beaker and picking up the gel and squishing it with his fingers for everyone to change their minds.

Other sessions included lessons on 3D printers, the molecular composition of crystals, the human brain, optical engineering and removing pollutants from food and water. The sessions were organized by Brown faculty, staff and students who volunteered for the event led by the Department of Chemistry.

In the demonstration on brain science, students from Pilgrim High School in Warwick got a lesson on how neurons in the brain communicate as well as an up-close view at what the brain actually looks like. When asked if anyone wanted to hold a plasticized human brain, 10th grader Dylan Borges was the first to step up.