A $15,000 grant from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation is helping SFI reach out to middle schoolers in Taos, N.M., says Irene Lee, who is principal investigator of SFI’s Project GUTS (“Growing Up Thinking Scientifically”) educational effort. Project GUTS aims to engage students in research projects that promote an understanding of complex systems and the value of computer modeling and simulation in scientific research.
In Taos, Project GUTS is being offered this school year as a one-year after-school program. It is free to motivated Taos-area students entering the 7th or 8th grades. Though participants come from diverse backgrounds, they share an interest in scientific inquiry, problem solving, and investigating topics of interest to the local community, Irene says. Once student projects are complete, participants share their results at community roundtables also organized by SFI.
“Seeing middle school youth present their research may encourage the broader community to believe that they, too, can bene t from science,” she says.
In New Mexico, she explains, fewer and fewer students in grade K through 12 are taking science, technology, engineering, and math- ematics (STEM) courses. In fact, according to the New Mexico Standards-Based Assess- ments (NMSBA), interest and performance in these subjects drops significantly during the middle school years.
Project GUTS addresses this problem “by offering high quality STEM activities that appeal to a wide range of students, make science relevant, and prepare students for future endeavors in STEM classes and fields,” Irene says.
For more information, www.projectguts.org