Going Global with Gautham Venugopalan and Richard Novak
May 2011
What does it take to bring hands-on science not only to the wide range of elementary classrooms in the East Bay, but also to students around the world, spanning cultures very different from our own?
Gautham Venugopalan and Richard Novak are finding out through their involvement in both Community in the Classroom and Future Scientist…
What does it take to bring hands-on science not only to the wide range of elementary classrooms in the East Bay, but also to students around the world, spanning cultures very different from our own? Gautham Venugopalan and Richard Novak are two volunteers who are finding out through their involvement in both Community in the Classroom and Future Scientist, a UC-Berkeley group aiming to bring relevant and accessible science experiences to children in the developing world.
Venugopalan’s association with CIC is a testament to the reach of the program and the powerful impression it can make on volunteers. He began volunteering three years ago, as a new graduate student at UC Berkeley, after learning about CIC from one of his undergraduate professors who was himself a volunteer during his days as a Cal graduate student.
These days, Venugopalan has taken on a leadership role as a member of the CIC campus steering committee, a group of graduate students who help dictate the program’s direction at Cal and give voice to the campus’ more than 150 volunteers. Novak decided to get in on the action himself last year after seeing how much fun his colleagues were having in elementary classrooms.
Both scientists seem to have a natural gift for getting kids excited about science. Novak has developed a life sciences lesson for fifth graders irresistibly titled, “Please Play with Your Food,” in which students use yeast to compare the sugar content in various juices. By making use of balloons to capture the gas produced by the yeast as they digest the juice, the students can see with their own eyes how much sugar is being digested in each case.
This year, the two have teamed up to teach Venugopalan’s wildly popular “Optics and Light” lesson. They have third grade students create tiny magnifying lenses from water droplets and use water to refract light and make a penny disappear – as Venugopalan describes it, “a great magic trick sure to impress friends and family.”
Now, they’re taking their commitment to science education to new frontiers. Last year, Novak and a group of his fellow graduate students started Future Scientist, a student-led organization that intertwines science education with development projects in the developing world. The organization was founded on the premise that “cultivating knowledge in the sciences and combining it with technical training enables resource-poor communities to sustainably address their own needs.” During its first year, Novak, Venugopalan and others traveled to an orphanage in Puerto Alegria, Peru, where they taught practical, hands-on lessons on solar energy, water filtration, and disease transmission – in Spanish. At the same time, they installed a group of solar panels that currently provide sustainable energy to the orphanage.
For this past year, they refined the program to make it even more useful and engaging for the communities they’re serving – as Novak describes, making it a point to “provide obviously practical projects as a deployment method for our science lessons so that people could see the benefits of the education program.” This meant working with Project Amazonas, a Peruvian/American non-profit, to develop their own biogas digester made to withstand – and sustain – the Amazon environment. These digesters are then used as the focal point for a variety of applied scientific lessons.
Both Venugopalan and Novak remember having a strong scientific curiosity from an early age, and it’s precisely this curiosity that they hope to cultivate with their teaching. “As a kid I liked doing hands on activities and ‘helping’ my dad build things around the house,” recalls Venugopalan. “Now I get to build instruments and make little tissue samples to study. It’s like grownup versions of building Lego castles and making Jell-O.” As a child, Novak remembers spending “several hours each day wandering the forests, creeks, and swamps near my house. I would often times come back totally muddy and wet, usually holding a snake or salamander in my hand, and be completely happy.” Nowadays, “[CIC] allows me to show kids and the teachers who might be hesitant to study or teach science that there is nothing to be afraid of. It’s an excuse to have a fun time looking at how the world works.”
Venugopalan and Novak are perfect examples of the passion, commitment, and generosity shared by CIC volunteers. We continue to be amazed by the depth and breadth of volunteers’ dedication to sharing their love of science with potential scientists of all ages, and we’re flattered to be a part of this effort.
To learn more about Future Scientist, or make a donation, please visit http://futurescientist.org/.