Erika Ebbel Angle, a biochemist and the former Miss Massachusetts, has a promo shot of herself wearing a tiara and a lab coat. It’s on the site Science from Scientists, which she founded in 2002, before she became Miss Massachusetts.
The promo shot is for a 10-minute show she runs about science, entitled simply “The Dr. Erika Show,” available in Boston from Comcast On Demand, and on the Web, here. There are only two episodes at the moment, one about the Solar System and one about static electricity, but at least two more are planned for this fall.
Her organization, it is hoped, “inspires and motivates youth to embrace Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM),” a statement on their website declares. “Our goal is to ensure our nation’s youth is competitive globally in STEM fields through exciting, informative and engaging training by practicing scientists. Our instructors are individuals passionate about science who have undergraduate degrees in STEM, and have received or are pursuing advanced degrees in STEM or education.”
But as the Boston Globe reports, some of the interesting moments in the shows so far have been where kids in the audience ask questions not about science but about beauty pageants.
One question was about why pageant contestants wave a certain way. “We wave this way because …” she started, and the kids finished for her, “… because armpits aren’t pageant-y!”
But that kind of chat just gets the kds into the studio and into the whole Science from Scientists organization, which has also produced a long list of lessons, which I was unable to access on the website.
The emphasis is decidedly on hands-on learning, including work in school classrooms, field trips to MIT, the New England Aquarium, and the Museum of Science, as well as a “CSI Day” experience you could purchase, where the organization will actually create a forensic lab for students to play around in. We wrote about a forensic science camp in Maryland a little while ago, calling it very efficient and deeply rooted learning. The goals of forensic science are interdisciplinary and bring in knowledge from many different areas of science and technology.
“It’s important for children to understand that science isn’t this one area; it’s the material that your car’s made out of, it’s the chair you’re sitting in, it’s your iPhone,” the Globe quoted Dr Ebbel Angle as saying. “Science is in everything. To be able to think like a scientist or to be able to ask the right types of inquisitive questions, that just helps you; that’s a life skill.”
