Welcome to Beyond the Classroom on PBS39.

I'm your host, Joe Pacitti, and it's a pleasure to sit down with you this evening.

Each of us, if you're of a certain age, remember science in our classrooms, whether it was adding a block of sulfur to an acid, don't ask me which acid exactly, I don't remember, causing an explosive reaction in your high school chemistry lab or watching Mr Wizard on Friday afternoons.

After Reading Rainbow, of course.

Then there were the demonstration labs, usually in the gym, where we saw everything from liquid nitrogen, courtesy of the fine folks to Air Products, to live birds of prey.

Tonight, we're going to sit down with two individuals who will talk us through how we can all welcome the beauty of science into our kids' lives.

Let's get started.

I want to thank both of our guests for joining us this evening.

I'm very excited to talk science tonight, which is a nice change of pace, I think, for everybody.

So I'm eager to get into the discussion.

Thank you, Maria Wileczek and Bill Petterson.

Maria, would you like to just tell us a little bit about yourself, what your role is, why you're passionate about science?

- Thanks for having me.

My name is Maria Wileczek and I am currently a curriculum supervisor at Colonial School District in Montgomery County.

So I help to write in the sequence of what is taught in science in the school district, starting from kindergarten through 12th grade.

- Excellent.

Thank you, Maria.

Thank you for joining us tonight.

Bill?

- Yes.

So, I'm owner operator of Mad Science at Lehigh Valley.

I've been operating it for the past 14 years.

It was in existence for nine years before I took it over.

And we work in all the school districts between Northampton, Lehigh, Monroe and Carbon Counties.

- Excellent.

And again, thank you both.

Maria, I want to start with an opening question for you.

So in terms of curriculum K through 12, right, there's a lot that goes into that in terms of what students see in a science continuum.

Can you walk us through at each level, elementary school, middle school, high school, what they can expect to see from a science perspective?

- Well, what they can expect to see in years to come and what they can see now are two very different things.

Hopefully, most of the school districts have a K through five science curriculum, but unfortunately, that is not the case across the state or even across the country.

Some schools don't even start teaching science until sixth grade, which is really unfortunate.

But if we are talking about how we want to do things sequentially, we want to introduce kids to science as early as possible, because it's then, at those early ages, that they're most eager to learn and figure out the world around them and they have the least inhibitions or worries about doing something, so to speak, wrong, because science, truly done right, isn't about doing it right or wrong but taking as many attempts as you need to figure out what is the correct course of action and coming up with the right explanations and understanding commonalities and patterns and systems and so forth.

So what you should see at an early age, the science curriculum is developed upon three different prongs, which is your life science, your physical science and your earth and space science.

So the way that we look at it currently is that every single year students should have at least one touch on each of those sciences as they go through up until their middle school experience is complete.

And so then once they hit high school, then it differentiates into the common biology, chemistry, physics and so forth and different electives.

So you should see all of those areas being touched.

But hopefully you're seeing lots of hands-on opportunities for kids where they're coming up and devising explanations on their own and solving problems that they see in the world around them and then seeing patterns as they go through higher levels of education.

- That's excellent.

Thank you.

It's discouraging to hear that a lot of students... And, Bill, I'll ask that question of you, too, that K through five, there's not a lot of exposure to science as we would formally expect to see it.

Is that true?

- Unfortunately, the secret to our success is that kids are not getting it from preschool through... Well, my son got it in fourth grade.

It was the first taste of it that he got.

And it was not very exciting for him in the very beginning.

So what we focus in on is getting the kids excited at a very early age, engage them.

As Maria was saying, they're eager to learn at that point.

We have the great fortune to be able to just go into the class and get kids excited about science.

Our instructors don't have to test the children or anything like that.

We just want to make sure they're having fun.

So we do the stuff that catches on fire and flies across the room or bursts or floats or flies, whatever.

And that's where we take it.

Try to get these kids to understand that no matter what they want to do in life, science will help them do it better and you can have fun doing it along the way.

We found, and I found this from a personal experience myself, when you're having fun, it is simple for the kids to learn.

They just learn.

They don't even realize they're learning as they go along.

So we have a whole class.

We sit and fold paper airplanes and throw paper airplanes, and we have a whole class on slime.

We break the slime down to a molecular level and let the kids make their own type of slime.

You can make it real rubbery.

You can make it real slimy slime.

We have contests.

We put them through a little Olympics.

There's no right or wrong in our classes, and we find that we get great engagement from the children.

And when we go into our schools and offer our programs, our classes fill up.

Every single time.

It's rare that we don't have a full class.

- That's excellent.

And I know that the community is remarkably engaged in that work as well.

- Absolutely.

Which makes it even better when you have parents and community involved with the kids at the same time.

It goes a long way.

- That's wonderful.

Maria, could you talk a little bit about what it means to be a scientist?

We use that phrase all the time with kids.

Walk us through it.

- Yeah, well, to me, I'm very passionate when we say those terms, because when I speak to teachers, especially at the elementary level, the first thing that they have to share with their kids is that anybody that's trying to attempt any type of science is automatically a scientist.

We really want children to feel that science is attainable.

So, you know, at an early age, kids are so willing, as we said, to try and attempt science and make connections to the world around them.

It's critical.

That's how they become better citizens in the long run.

And we want to kind of capitalize on that feeling.

But research shows that once they hit middle school, that interest and that feeling that they can do it tapers off and it tapers off even more so in your underrepresented groups.

So having students have that experience of being a "scientist", approaching things in an investigative way, being successful with it and understanding the whole process of making a mistake is the way that you're supposed to do it.

To learn from your mistakes and then build upon that is really, really important at a fundamental age.

So it's really just a matter of everybody is a scientist and how we approach our investigations and how we see things that we want to question and how we come up with solutions and work together to figure out what's the best approach to make sense of phenomena that are going on around us.

- So, Bill, I have a second grader.

What's that look like?

Right?

Maria's just described this idea of making connections and identifying phenomena.

What's it look like?

- Well, I'm glad you say that, because what we try to do is make a correlation in every... ..type of science that we are teaching.

So we teach it all, we have hundreds of classes that we teach, but we try to correlate that to kids.

How will you use this in the future or how is it used in the future?

So often, especially with math...

I'll use math as an example here.

I have a lot of great friends who are master carpenters and we all went through school together and through math.

And how often would you hear in the classroom, where am I ever going to use this math?

Well, guess what?

You do.

And my friends found out, unfortunately, after the fact.

Many of them ended up going back and taking night classes to catch up and brush up on their math skills as they became more involved in carpentry because they didn't realize that there was a real life correlation to it all.

And when a kid is sitting down and looking at something, even slime, we can make a correlation in real life, why slime is important to us, the molecular make-up of it, why that's interesting and what we can do with it.

So making a correlation to real life stuff for kids is huge.

And we always say, listen, you're good at something.

It might be sports, it might be art, it might be music.

Who knows?

But whatever you're good at, science can help you be even better at it.

- That's an excellent message.

And, Maria, how does that integrate with other subject areas, too?

- I'm so glad you asked me that question, because that is really the key, and that's what's so wonderful about science.

And it makes me so sad that schools don't start science in an early age for that reason, because that is the way to connect all different disciplines.

It's fantastic.

You have the opportunity to build literacy with science, you have the ability to build on math skills within science.

So you're taking those other experiences and applying them in a real world to make them meaningful to students.

And they don't even realize that they're building on those skills that they're practicing in other areas.

So truly, science is a way to be transdisciplinary, so we say, that we can intersect all different types of content.

And that is one of the challenges that teachers have, is they can't fit science into their day because they're struggling with a lot of ELA and different structures there and a lot of math structures.

And so fitting sciences is like a 20 minute a day once a week, maybe, if we're lucky, twice a week, kind of thing.

But if we take it from a different approach where we're applying the other disciplines as well, reading a story that's based upon science and then doing an activity about that is just as valuable.

So, you know, it's a really nice approach.

But then, as you move further into the higher grades, again, the importance of being scientifically literate, which is different than just being literate altogether, is really applicable as you're trying to look at science journals and research and dissecting what those mean and looking at graphs and tables and doing your analysis.

It's just the intersection of all different disciplines and it's constantly evolving, which to me makes it exciting and fascinating.

- Well, and I think that phrasing it that way is remarkably important as well, because from a parent's perspective...

I was a humanities major and so my background is not what we would say like properly scientific.

Right?

Although I like to think that I fancy myself a scientist some days, I'm definitely not.

But when it comes to the approachability of science, I feel like that may be a barrier for some folks.

How exactly do you approach that with people who may be reticent to engage in science?

- Well, you're absolutely right that science, unfortunately, especially in my age group, has a preconceived notion that it's difficult, hard to understand.

But people don't realize that they're doing science every day.

You cook a meal in the morning, you're conducting chemistry, you're doing science.

If Dad's a mechanic, he's using science.

If he's an artist, he's using science.

If he's a house painter, he's using science all about it.

So to get the parents to involve, when we do our programs, we invite the parents to hang out in class with us.

They can sit and spend the whole day in class with us if they want.

They unfortunately usually don't.

But if they want to, absolutely, come in, do the activities with the kids.

We structure our classes that we give our children take-homes for every class, and we want them to take it home, do it with the little brothers, sisters, moms and dads.

It reinforces what we were talking about in class, lets Mom and Dad know a little bit of what they are.

To the kids, it almost seems like it's a toy, but there's science behind it and they maybe talk it out with mom and dad.

Often we find mom and dad get involved a little bit with it afterwards.

So you've got to take down the stigma that it's difficult and unattainable and, I'm not smart, I'm not smart enough for science.

Or unfortunately we find a lot is, I'm a girl, and we get unfortunately a ton of boys signing up for Mad Science but we don't get quite as many girls signing up as we'd like to see.

So, you know, we've got to just pull down that curtain and let everybody know that it's for everybody, no matter what it is.

I tell children all the time the first person to get me excited about science was my third grade art teacher.

And he was talking to us.

We were doing Scribbler, and he was talking about all that.

And it kind of piqued my interest in science.

And after that, that's where I started to pick it up and run with it.

- Well, that's excellent.

Maria, when it comes to young ladies in STEM and that science, there is a perspective... And I feel like we're making a lot of progress towards eliminating that stigma or that idea that it's not possible, right, as Bill said, if you are a female.

Can you talk to specific initiatives and things that our district has done or possibly in the Commonwealth that have helped stem the tide there?

- Well, I mean, there's a couple of things that we can speak about with this, because it's not just females, it's all underrepresented groups.

But females are a big shift.

And I feel like that's actually what drove me to want to do science, because people told me it was hard and a lot of girls didn't do it.

So I kind of wanted to pursue that for that reason.

I know that sounds really crazy, but that was a drive for me, because I wanted to prove that it was something I could attain.

But we have looked at research across the country.

Girls taper off once they come into middle school for reasons that are beyond the classroom.

But society in general has kind of a stigma, as you said, Bill, that it's hard to do and girls shouldn't be going in that path, that it's not a girl area or profession.

We in the district have done a lot of different things.

We've had different clubs to help promote.

We've done after-school activities and summer enrichment where we've done just for females and marketed at them so they were in an environment where they felt safe and secure.

So for seven years we ran a program called Girls In Technology, which we're very proud of.

That was sponsored by many different companies like Lockheed Martin, Quaker Chemical.

And we would actually have people from the industry come in and help support us.

We also did a lot of computer science in those courses, not just general, your typical life science or physical science stuff.

So that was really great to see, kids working and designing apps and females having role models that were other females to help support them.

Another important piece was we would take young girls that were in elementary and middle school in these programs and we would have them be taught by teachers that are at the high school to help make connections for these kids so that once they come to the high school level, they have someone that they already know that teaches in some of these different areas to help make a connection for them so that when they go to choose courses in their high school career, they say, oh, I already know that teacher, I want to take that class, because that personal connection, especially for females, is really key.

But I think also that you're going to see a shift in Pennsylvania science in general, because as we shift to the next generation science standards, a big piece of that is teaching and starting at an early age and teaching of phenomena, as I mentioned to you.

And I'm going to give you a specific quote, if you will bear with me.

And I have to use my glasses.

I apologize.

- Sure, not a problem.

- It's strictly that children try to understand and influence the world around them.

They develop ideas about their role in the world and how it works.

In fact, the capacity for young children from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels to reason in sophisticated ways is much greater than has long been assumed.

So this is an excerpt that's taken right out of one of my favorite books.

It's called The Framework...

I have it right here.

A Framework for K-12 Science Education is one of the books that's in all of our schools across the district.

It's a little bit old, came out in 2013, but it really is there to help support teachers as they're trying to roll out next generation science standards.

But that statement right there speaks to science as a levelling field for kids of all backgrounds, because every type of experience, whether it's if you're living in a rural area, whether you're living in an urban area, regardless, you've had some sort of life experience that you can then relate to, bring to the table, look at, investigate further.

And we really need to capitalize on that starting at a really young age, because it gives kids the opportunity to make better sense of the world and then collaborate with their peers to come up with different scenarios, different solutions, different explanations.

So I think that's another approach.

I think we take these hands-on activities, and we do them at an early age.

We make sense of the surroundings in the world that is relatable to them.

And we try to do that as we go throughout, in addition to having fun activities, having books that they read that reinforce it, doing science, journaling.

So all of these things, it's good practice for all learners, but it really helps those kids that have insecurities later on.

If you build the foundation at a young age, you'll see that, as they pursue and they go on, that the numbers of those people, underrepresented or female, whatever it might be, will be really adjusted as you go through.

For example, our high school, Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, recently won an award in computer science because it had the most females.

So we were nationally recognized for having a huge number of females in our courses, which is fantastic, that's really not common.

So those types of things, feeder programs, pushing kids, the guidance counselors being on top of it, we have multiple approaches to helping make sure that we have females in our classes as we move through and that they're successful if they want to go on beyond high school.

- Well, Maria, what I really think was important in your explanation was that idea of personal connection.

Right?

And regardless of gender, too, that idea of building those relationships with folks is going to be key in order to encourage students to really engage in science.

And, Bill, you came prepared tonight with...

It just brought me back to a place that made me very happy, watching your demonstration.

Could you walk us through it just briefly?

Because when I think of personal connection, that's the kind of thing I'm thinking when it comes to getting kids excited about science.

- Yeah.

So, you know, and some of these demonstrations people might have seen, but we take it to kind of another level, and you'll see as part of the demonstration.

We're talking about air pressure and something near and dear to us and people take it for granted.

And young children, believe it or not, don't understand that air weighs anything.

And by the time we're done with them in a 60 minute class, they know all about all the different properties of air.

So my demonstration kind of goes through a few fun things that kids and parents hopefully can try at home.

- Excellent.

Let's take a look.

- Good evening, everyone, and thank you for having me here at PBS39.

My name is Bill Petterson.

I'm the chief mad scientist over at Mad Science of Lehigh Valley.

And they have asked me to do a little demonstration.

And I thought I would do a few demonstrations on air pressure today.

So first, to start off, I brought a special friend here with me.

His name is Egbert, and Egbert is pretty well known in the Mad Science family.

He gets launched off of rockets, he gets thrown off of buildings with home-made parachutes, he gets launched on catapults.

So he goes through a lot of stuff for us.

But today he's going to help us demonstrate air pressure.

Now, believe it or not, air weighs something.

It weighs actually a lot.

If I could take out all the air in the studio here except for a box about that big, it would weigh as much as a bowling ball.

And that's about 15 pounds per square inch.

For us, it's like there's two elephants squeezing on us all the time, believe it or not.

But we're earthlings and we're used to living here on Earth and our bodies are pressing back on all that air, those two elephants that are squeezing on us, and we stay here perfectly fine.

Right?

Let me show you what happens if we take that air away.

So for this, we let Egbert have a stunt double.

And we're going to try to get the egg inside of my flask without touching it, so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to.... ..use a little paper and I'm going to use some fire.

Now, everybody knows what this is and these aren't to be played with.

If anybody, especially my young friends out there, find this laying on, let's say, the playground, what would you do?

Go tell an adult.

Don't even pick it up.

Leave it laying right there where it is.

Let the adult go and pick it up.

But today, because I'm a mad scientist, I'm going to try to use this fire in this later a little bit.

Now, the thing that's interesting to remember is fire eats air.

It eats it up.

There's only so much air.

If there's only so much air in this studio, there's only so much that that fire can eat up.

If it eats all that air, the fire goes out.

So I'm going to put some fire inside the jar and it's going to start eating the air that's inside that jar.

Then I'm going to place Egbert on top of that jar and we'll observe what happens and then we'll talk about it for a second.

So first, we're going to light that.

So what happened, we can ask ourselves.

Well, it was actually very... And, Egbert, that's why we use a stunt double.

Egbert was sitting here on top of the jar.

There was air inside the jar and air out here, like there's two elephants inside there and two elephants out here.

Right?

And instead of a tug-of-war, I like to describe it that they're having a push of war.

The elephants inside are pushing up, the elephants out here are pushing down.

Well, when my fire ate all the air or the elephants inside the jar, boom, it pushed.

All these guys out here were strong enough to push the egg inside the jar.

Kind of interesting.

And you have to remember that air weighs something.

Now, because it weighs something, we could do a couple other little things that you could try to do at home.

I'm going to start off by using a straw and a ping pong ball.

Simple enough.

Now, my straw happens to be a bendy straw.

It doesn't have to be a bendy straw, but I'm going to use it as a bendy straw.

And in this one, we have to remember that, believe it or not, water and air have a lot of the same characteristics.

They act a lot the same.

So if I was in the pool and pushed some water away, what would happen?

The water would come rushing right back afterwards, right?

Well, because of that, it lets me do this.

Pretty cool, huh?

Why didn't it fall off the side?

Well, if you were in the pool, you push some of that water away, some more water would come rushing right back in.

Same thing with my air.

I push all this air away and all this air wants to come rushing in where I pushed it away from.

So as long as I'm pushing that away, that air away, this air keeps trying to go in and my ping pong ball has no place to go.

It's like a little tube of air.

You can take it up a notch if you want to... ..and use a hairdryer.

If you're going to use a hairdryer, please, please get an adult to do it with you.

These can be a little dangerous if not used properly, but we'll try to use it.

Here we go.

And now... ..makes it a lot easier.

You can sit there and do it a lot longer if you can balance it a little bit better.

But here's the crazy thing that I like to do, because I always like to step things up a notch or two.

So we are going to do just that.

Now, forgive me for a sec.

I got a leaf blower here.

Really loud.

This one you definitely have to use mom or dad if you need help.

And if I get this plugged in... OK. there we go.

Now, I use an electric leaf blower, that's the best way to do it.

A beachball.

So those are really fun things you can try at home.

Make sure if you try those other things with electricity that you got an adult to help you out.

But otherwise, I hope you have a lot of fun with doing some science.

Have a great day.

- Yeah, that was fantastic, Bill, thank you again so much for that demonstration.

I kind of want to close on...

I'm not going to say an odd question, but I want to ask about holiday shopping, if that's OK.

There are lots and lots of toys that are marketed to us as adults for our children and sometimes just for adults regarding science.

How do I siphon through that?

What's going to be a good gift for my children, or is there a good gift that's really going to encourage them to be scientists?

Maria.

- Well, I have young kids myself and some things you buy with great hope that they're going to be these things that are going to change their lives and they just end up somewhere all over the floor and you have to pick it up later on.

And then there are some things that they really get gravitated towards.

I think anything that you do that will expose your child to have a sense of wonder and want to build upon that, is a great toy.

For myself, it's kind of based upon where the interest lies with my kids.

My kids love Legos, and Legos are great for the imagination, for them to continue to build, try to construct, redesign.

That's like the whole engineering design process.

That's fantastic.

I also have from an early age, we started with little, cute microscopes for the kids, where the slide talks to them and explains to them what they're looking at.

My kids set up a whole laboratory for themselves, you know, and they thought they were scientists.

Fantastic.

And then we take that outside and we look for leaves.

So it's just having the tools and knowing what they are, spending time with your kids as they're using them.

And if you can build upon that further outside, that's fantastic.

- Excellent.

Thank you, Maria.

Bill.

- I'm going to give you an easy one.

Binoculars.

And you wouldn't think of it, but binoculars are great ones.

You can use it.

First of all, they're better than a telescope to look at the moon, but you can use it for bird watching, animal watching, looking at nature, trees, whatever.

So I found at an early age binoculars were a great gift for my kids.

I used it for all sorts of science based stuff.

- And a sketchbook to go with it, too.

- Yes.

Very good.

Excellent, excellent.

- That's an excellent idea.

And that was the thing, too.

I mean, I've gone through goodness knows how many of these different types of toys in my own house and none of them ever took, the coding software, all those other things.

It turns out that, yes, you said binoculars.

I was laughing because my son has binoculars and frequently uses those, or the boxes that they came in, more often than anything else.

So I just want to thank both of you once again for taking your time this evening.

I know that this was remarkably informative for me.

I know people watching are going to be very thankful to have some concrete advice, things that they can take home in the spirit of science.

So, Maria, Bill, thank you so much for your time.

- I appreciate it.

- Thank you.

- As the proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child.

And we hope that you'll consider our program a part of your village.

If you have questions or comments, we want to hear from you.

Go to PBS39.org/classroom or join the conversation on social media.

I'm your host, Joe Pacitti.

Goodnight.