High School Students Take a Walk on the Wilder Side of Science

Ioana Patringenaru | January 26, 2009

High school students try hands-on activities during Science Gone Wild!, an outreach event that took place Thursday at the Price Center. Here students learn about evolution and extracting DNA.

They learned about the biochemical mechanisms behind the research that earned UCSD scientist Roger Tsien the Nobel Prize last year. They found out how much oxygen their bodies use. They tried to figure out the geography of the brain.

More than 120 high school students from all over San Diego County took part Thursday evening in Science Gone Wild!, an outreach event organized by UCSD’s BioBridge program and the Hughes Scholars Program. The goal was to get students excited about science, said Catherine Condliffe, the program’s coordinator. The event is particularly geared to under-represented students, she added.

Watch a video profiling the Science Gone Wild! program, which aims to get high school students excited about science.

“We're really trying to open up the eyes of students from surrounding schools to all of the fun and excitement surrounding science right now,” she said.

To achieve that goal, Condliffe and a small army of undergraduate and graduate students set up activities in the Price Center East Ballroom Thursday evening that covered both basic science concepts and groundbreaking ones. During the course of the evening, groups of students tried out the hands-on activities and took notes. Then they competed in a Jeopardy! style contest.

Science Gone Wild adds an extra layer of wackiness to science outreach by peppering the proceedings with pop-culture references. So, students split up in groups named “Cell Bells,” “Paranoid Androids” and “Darwin Dogs,” among others. Activities also received zany names, such as “Insane in the Brain” and “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.” High school and undergraduate students alike wore T-shirts with the slogan “When DNA meets Dr. Dre,” after the famous rapper and record producer. Dr. Dre has nothing to do with the program though, Condliffe cautioned. “We’re trying to infuse science with pop culture,” she explained.

The approach is working, several students said. "I did want to study science before,” said Sarah Pressl, a senior at Serra High School in San Diego. “But seeing how it can be found in just about anything definitely made me want to do it even more.”

Hands-on activities

A student wears a device that measures the amount of oxygen she uses.

Thursday night, for the “Insane in the Brain” activity, Sarah and her classmates examined several small brains laid out on a table. The goal was to allow students to familiarize themselves with the names of different regions of that organ and their function, Condliffe said. Students were a little hesitant at first to handle the objects laid out in front of them. “There’s nothing dangerous about these brains,” said Sarah Parylak, one of the UCSD students guiding high schoolers through the experiment.

A few yards away, Amberli Carrasco, a student at Mira Mesa High School, was starting to break a sweat while taking part in another of the evening’s activities. Amberli, 16, was getting on and off a small step stool to try and figure out how much oxygen her body used at rest and after exercising. “You can do it,” said David Buse, a science teacher at Southwest High in South San Diego County. He was working with UCSD graduate student Alfred Chappell on the activity.

After three minutes of exercise, Amberli breathed into a contraption that measured the amount of oxygen she exhaled. It came in at 19 percent. Ambient air is 21 percent oxygen, so she only used about 2 percent during her workout, Buse said. Amberli didn’t let that get her down.

“I’m used to textbooks,” she said. “But this is interactive, which I love.”

Nobel Prize research

High school students learn about fluorescent proteins manufactured in the lab of Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien.

In another corner of the Price Center East Ballroom, a group of girls huddled behind a curtain to look at fluorescent vials under a black light. The vials were full of fluorescent proteins engineered in the lab of UCSD Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien. He and his colleagues chose to name the proteins after fruits, explained Shelley Glenn, lead coordinator of the Socrates Fellows program, also a BioBridge offshoot.

One student was struggling to understand how scientists got the proteins to glow under a light source. To make the proteins fluoresce, they have to be exposed to a light source that’s slightly higher on the light spectrum, Glenn explained. That’s why violet, for instance, won’t just glow under a dark light, she went on. It needs ultra-violet light.

Nearby, Donna Ross, a biology and chemistry teacher for 10th and 11th-graders at Health Sciences High, a small charter school in City Heights, watched as seven of her students rotated between the various activities. Science outreach is really important, she said. Students benefit anytime they can visit a college campus and familiarize themselves with college life, she added. “It makes all of that seem more realistic,” she explained.