RU invites aspiring young scientists to campus for a day
Programs like Science Exploration Day and Summer Bridge (above) bring students to campus for hands-on learning.
More than 50 middle school students will discover the wonders of science on Saturday, April 20, when Radford University's College of Science and Technology (CSAT) hosts its 2013 Science Exploration Day.
CSAT's departments will host six sessions: electronics, programming, forensic chemistry, cryptology, insect biology and forensic anthropology for students from Pulaski and Montgomery county and Radford city schools. Six faculty members, working with peer instructors and students in the CSAT STEM Club, will entertain and challenge the young scholars with demonstrations, experiments and activities at morning, afternoon and daylong sessions.
"This is a chance to share our excitement about science, technology and discovery while giving these young people a glimpse of the facilities and the scientific process," said event organizer Art Carter, CSAT associate dean.
Science Exploration Day's two full-day classes will include a session focused on basic electronics, distribution of electric power and wiring. Aspiring engineers will build their own series, parallel and transistor circuits, and solder a robot kit. In the other all-day session, students will create animations with the Snap! Application—tracing the spiral of a computer-turtle, steering a spaceship or drawing a fractal tree.
The half-day sessions will give students a chance to be forensic chemists and forensic anthropologists. They will analyze powders, soils and dyes as evidence to solve crimes and gather information from a human skeleton to learn to recognize if a person was killed by an injury or body trauma.
With interactive discussions and mini-experiments that feature giant cockroaches and moths, the session called "Growing Up Insect" will introduce the young scholars to aspects of insect biology like the evolution and regulation of insect growth and hormones that regulate life cycles.
In the session called "Cryptology: Making and Breaking Secret Codes," topics will include how experts in secret communication and code-breaking form numbers, symbols and patterns into secret codes and then crack them.
Learn more about Radford University at www.radford.edu.