The Brown Space Club seeks to establish a base level of scientific competency and knowledge in primary school students through the use of on-going lesson plans on basic space-science concepts.  These lessons will also teach the students about the scientific method and how science works.  Once a basic understanding of the scientific method is grasped by the students, we will introduce lessons designed directly to incorporate information from our experiments and ask the children to evaluate our experiments based on what they have learned. 

Recently, our group has worked with Providence Science Outreach (PSO) to develop a new space science lesson for the PSO instructors to teach.  We used our experience last year to help develop a lesson about gravity, microgravity, and spatial disorientation.  As is typical with PSO lessons, we planned many interactive experiments to teach students about these concepts.  We also included our video of our experiment in microgravity to demonstrate the effects of microgravity.  Around two to three members of our club will travel with the PSO teams to aid in teaching the lesson.  PSO teams will thus be able to continue outreach by teaching this lesson that we developed to different schools throughout the year. Many of the schools we visit through Providence Science Outreach are underfunded and have a high percentage of minority students.  Attending underfunded schools can discourage students from continuing their education.  However, we hope that through our lessons on space and microgravity students will be inspired to do well in school and pursue higher education.

We plan to continue our expanded relationship with Providence Science Outreach, given the good relationship our members have with the program as members have participated in PSO before.  We also have relationships with other programs including the Rhode Island Space Grant and Brown University’s Swearer Center for Public Service.  In addition to these preexisting relationships with organizations, we intend to continue our own independent outreach with schools with the hope of expanding to high schools. 

Our typical lesson starts with us introducing basic science concepts like gravity and the properties of the three phases of matter.  We always have interactive demonstrations like dropping objects of different mass at the same time or liquids in different shaped containers to maintain the students’ attention throughout the lesson.  We have found that teaching concepts without demonstrations results in students either getting confused or losing interest.  Following this basic introduction, we then introduce the scientific method to students and its usefulness in all fields of science.

Internally, the Brown Space Club has grown in numbers this year.  We also have a wide array of majors and academic interests that are not just in the sciences and engineering.  We feel that with our higher numbers we will be able to do more outreach in the Providence community than before.  Our higher numbers are evident already in our ability to collaborate and travel with Providence Science Outreach to aid in teaching the space science lesson we developed with them.