A group of Boston-area middle schoolers got a taste of college life last month as they sat in on CAS researcher Paul Trunfio’s Physics 2 (PY 106) class.
The students listened to a lecture and saw live demonstrations of the relationship between electricity and magnetism—including magnetic levitation, electromagnets, magnetic brakes, and more.
Their visit was part of an ongoing collaboration between BU and Sociedad Latina, a Roxbury-based organization dedicated to uplifting at-risk Latino youth. The program, “Network Science for All: Positioning Underserved Youth for Success in Pursuing STEM Pathways,” is supported and funded by a $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Network Science for All brings together the CAS Physics department, along with the Center for Career Readiness at Wheelock, and Government and Community Affairs, as well as the Boston Public Schools, MassEdCo’s GEAR UP, and BoSTEM to get young people excited about careers in STEM. Trunfio says the goal is “to merge quality STEM curricula/programs for K-12 (that we develop) with career readiness curriculum (that Wheelock develops), and contextualize it all within government and community affairs.”
“We train teachers in innovative curricula that they can implement in both STEM as well as career pathways,” he said, “so students can see how to get from where they are to where they ‘might want to be.’”
Doug Most wrote about the program for BU Today last year.
In Trunfio’s class, the middle schoolers learned about forces, currents, and fields, plus some of the fascinating real world applications of changing electric and magnetic fields. They also worked alongside the undergraduate students in PY 106 on a short worksheet on forces and Newton’s Laws; during an open lab, they also got to participate in electricity- and magnetism-focused experiments, including one testing Faraday’s Law, whereby an electric current is formed by moving a magnet through a coil of wire.
The collaborative grant includes separate funding for Sociedad Latina; Trunfio and his colleagues see them as a “pilot group” for the Network Science for All model. The program, which is funded from 2020-2024, has been a hit so far: Trunfio just wishes it got the big kickoff they had in mind. The group was arranging appearances by then-Mayor Marty Walsh, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and major players at BU for the March 2020 launch, but plans had to be scrapped due to the COVID outbreak.
Trunfio says he hopes the program can become a model for this type of partnership at BU and beyond: and doing it collaboratively is the only way to get it done.
“In some sense we are still recovering from that… and haven’t achieved our potential,” he said. “But the model is, in my view, sound. […] our hope is that we can create a rich, welcoming environment and framework that will help others plug into it and have instant impact.”