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2018 BASF Science Education Grant Recipients
BASF Corporation awards 20 New Jersey public schools $5,000 each to support their science education programs. Each year, schools are invited to submit a proposal summarizing their specific science education needs and how a BASF grant would help their students explore STEM. Proposals are reviewed by the BASF Science Education Committee, and schools are chosen based on the science education needs described in the proposals received. At the end of the school year, each recipient school submits a brief description with accompany pictures explaining how the grant dollars helped the school’s science education efforts.
Beers Street Robotics
The grant will allow a mix of 5th and 6th grade students to meet on a weekly basis in 45-minute sessions to study a robotics curriculum. Students will be able to build models, program functions, code paths and perform objectives that relate to modern processes. The goal is that this initial exposure to coding processes will enlighten them to the possibilities of future technology careers.
Lab Equipment/Technology
Celebrate the Children is a school for children with special needs. This grant will fund experience-based lessons with Fisher Science Education Advanced+ Compound Microscopes and accompanying life science slides. These microscopes will help the students gain a more in depth understanding of the systems of the human body and other living organisms. The grant will also be used towards the purchase of Chromebooks for researching scientific topics. The goal is to give these students the same opportunities as a typical high school by providing them with effective researching tools.
STEAM Tank – Little Bits
The STEAM TANK Challenge is an authentic learning experience modeled after “Shark Tank.” In the STEAM TANK Challenge, students use their scientific and engineering skills to invent something or improve upon an existing design, presenting their final idea and product to a panel of local judges, students, staff and members of the community. The BASF grant will be used to purchase a Little Bits Pro Library with Wall Storage that will enable the school’s 8th grade students to take projects to a new level and turn visions into reality. The projects will also be presented during a student STEAM Day and submitted to the Google Science Fair.
Rainwater Harvesting with Kinetic Sculptures
Students in the 2nd grade and 5th thru 8th grades will work with an artist to build kinetic sculptures designed to harvest rainwater for watering plants and crops in a currently underused school courtyard. Students will explore the potential of movement and sound in kinetic sculptures. They will engage with systems, energy sources and design issues while creating a workable, moving sculpture; foster mechanical automata by incorporating hand-cranked mechanisms built and assembled by laser printers and 3D printers; and use collected rainwater to water lettuce, plants and other nutritious crops to be consumed by community members.
Stewardship and Sustainability: Classroom Exploration of Coastal Ecology and Water Management
This project will engage students learning about coastal ecology and government. Students will have both hands-on experiences and an inside look at how our local government is responding to climate change. Hoboken has become a lab for developing strategies for resiliency. “Rebuild by Design,” a team of experts from various disciplines including architecture, urban design, engineering, ecology and communication, has offered ideas for rethinking development in the context of storm surge and flooding. The Hudson River also provides students an opportunity to learn about the natural world at our fingertips.
VR in Classroom
The BASF grant will allow students to take an active role in their learning with virtual field trips that provide interactive experiences instead of passively reading about the subjects in textbooks. Teachers will have the ability to create lessons aligned with common core curricula that meet district goals of using technology for transformative learning. For example, a classroom studying Paris will be able to take a virtual tour of the Louvre Museum. The tour includes video, audio and high-resolution photos of each artifact. In a Biology or Anatomy class, virtual worlds place students directly into tours of human anatomy, providing an immersive exploration of the human body.
Indoor Aquaponics System
This grant will allow students in the school’s Environmental Club to be actively involved in the production of an aquaponics system. Students will conduct research on necessary water quality, aquatic species and plant life suitable to this environment.
Go and Create 3D
A new 3D printer in the media center makerspace will be used by students in grades K thru 6 so that they may fully experience the engineering process and turn their creative ideas into a reality. Having the students work through the design process and then be able to 3D print their prototype will add to the excitement of each STEM project.
FOOD Fight – A Basic Human Right
Students in grades Pre-K through 8 will grow and harvest a variety of plants in both internal aeroponic and traditional external garden boxes. Students will learn about the challenges we face as a society to grow an adequate supply of food with increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, continued growth in urban settings and an overall population increase. The project will stretch into the school day for all students and will extend learning after school with club activities that invite students to study, monitor, chart, forecast and synthesize growth data in two environmental conditions.
STREAM in Early Childhood
This grant will fund the purchase of literary science materials, supplies and technology resources for complete hands-on scientific activities that expose students to the world of engineering and design. The STREAM classroom will include a teacher to plan activities and provide the tools needed to accomplish tasks presented to the students.
Women in Science and Leadership
Traditionally, young girls were steered away from academics and careers in science and math. Funds from this grant will be used for field trips, programs and speakers in these areas to help students believe they can be whatever they want to be and dispel the myth that there are only male careers and female careers.
Teaching Technology and Life Skills through Coding and Robotics
Middle Township Elementary School #2 will implement an advanced technology program at the 4th grade level to serve as a model for other classes throughout the school. This program will use coding as a mechanism to teach students not only about robotics and engineering but also social and emotional skills such as patience, perseverance, communications and teamwork. This classroom will incorporate portable devices with coding technology and the Dash and Dot robotics educational system to teach students how to code robots for a variety of tasks linked to other classroom learning objectives.
Sayreville Public Schools Student Greenhouse Project
Students will build a school greenhouse to introduce science concepts, specifically soil, water and physics (getting water to plants). This project will equip students with hands-on agriculture experiences, plus build a school-wide sense of community through cross-curricular activities. Students will work toward a solution for limited resources resulting in food insecurity around the world. Students will grow and produce plants hydroponically, as well as in rich soil, then make comparisons between the two methods. The goal of the project is to find the most sustainable method of producing food. Success will be measured by the number of cross-curricular and community building projects that can be completed school-wide.
Coding a Pathway to Success
The grant funds will be used to purchase 50 FINCH robots. The FINCH robots, designed at Carnegie Mellon University, contain light, temperature, and obstacle sensors; accelerometers; motors; buzzer; LED; and pen mount. Advanced students with previous experience will have access to the more complex EV3 robots that belong to the robotics program. This differentiated approach will allow all students to be successful and provide them with learning skills that will support future endeavors.
3D Printer Makerspace
The school’s goal is to create a STEM program that will encourage students to grow and develop an appreciation for the wonders of science, technology, engineering and math. Access to a 3D Printer makerspace will generate an engaging STEM program for students in grades 5 through 8 allowing them to make three-dimensional objects from digital files. Paired with an inquiry-based curriculum, these tools will grant students access to skills that engineers use to help solve challenges in the real world.
Greenhouse Sustainable STEM and Science Learning for a Sustainable Earth
The goal of this project is for students to explore the science behind the production of plants and food sources for the world's population. The funds will go towards a digital sensor platform to fully characterize the greenhouse, soil and hydroponics environments being set up at our rural school and record plant growth and health. The grant will also help the school acquire several Vernier middle school LabQuest Deluxe Sensor Kits and software. Sampling our backyard environment by looking at data along a transect, observing environmental variables that influence plant growth and modeling and demonstrating the greenhouse effect both in smaller models and in a larger scale greenhouse, will reinforce to students that tracking and plotting data can give them a hands-on visual and analytical experience.
Biotech Research Equipment
The BASF grant will enable the school to purchase micropipettes, a vortexer, a centrifuge, a camera to record digital images and video for our microscopes and a fluorescent camera to record digital images and video. Many of the students are interested in Biotech topics such as developing sustainable fertilizers, the biochemistry of antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, and DNA Barcoding.
Gene Editing with CRISPR-Cas9 for AP Biology
The BASF grant will enable the AP Biology class to purchase CRISPR Cas9 kits to perform gene editing on bacteria. The CRISPR Cas9 system, originally discovered in bacteria, has been re-tooled to work as a cost effective, easy and precise way to target genes in any living organism and either eliminate or replace them. This technology is being used to save the cocoa (chocolate) plant from extinction, eliminate malaria and eliminate cancer genes in people.
Creation of a Garden Classroom for Environmental Science Education
Winslow Township High School will create an outdoor, science classroom to support the school’s new Environmental STEAM class, the AP Environmental Science class and Environmental Club. Environmental STEAM students will be involved in designing the garden layout, which will include a mix of vegetables and herbs, flowers and native Pinelands plants. With the help of their teachers, students will design, and construct raised bed gardens, plant boxes, flower beds and birdhouses. Students in future years will continue to use this garden space and add new elements to the outdoor classroom design.
Expanding STEAM Education in the Classroom and Community
This grant will expand STEAM education and a community-wide STEAM Fair in spring 2019. Funding will be used to expand the digital learning environment and make more experimentation equipment and challenge materials available in the STEAM classes. Demonstration kits and building supplies will be purchased to support classroom lessons and the Fair to help students explore design, construction, and problem solving.