Many students participate in a school science fair. To add extra motivation, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has organized a district-wide science fair for many years. In the second largest school district in California, the winners from each school gather at the OUSD STEM Fair to show off their projects. The Fair used to be at Chabot Space & Science Center but in recent years moved to Oakland High School taking over the gym and the Commons (a large indoor open space). Making the event more enticing, the district asks their science partner organizations (one of which is Berkeley Lab) to table at the event with a short hands-on activity. For well over a decade, Ina Reichel of Accelerator Technologies and Applied Physics (ATAP) and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) has organized the Lab’s exhibit at the event. This year, Gianna FazioLiu and Ian Lacey of the ALS helped Reichel in staffing the booth.
At our table we set up three lamps: one incandescent, one fluorescent, and one LED lamp. Lacey invited the kids to the demonstration, asking them, “Have you seen a rainbow today?” while handing them one of the diffraction gratings.
We then asked them to observe the three lamps and describe any difference they see in the way the light from the different lamps looks through the grating. It’s a great activity for the kids as inquiry-based learning and describing observations has proven to be more impactful than solely reading about science.
“Using diffraction gratings to separate visible light into constituent colors provided an analogy for how Berkeley Lab’s ALS probes chemical structures;” explains Ian Lacey. “The same principles used on Nobel Prize-winning beamlines, just different ‘colors.’”
“Community partnerships like these are deeply impactful because they provide new STEM exploration opportunities for the students and families we interact with, while inspiring the next generation of scientists to become part of the ALS and Berkeley Lab experience,” shared Gianna FazioLiu.
Other Berkeley Lab staff members participated in the event as judges for the science fair projects: Johannes Blaschke (NERSC), Katie Klymko (NERSC), Harry Lisabeth (Energy Geosciences), Odette Lounds (IT), Susan Lucas (ESNET), Neil Mehta (NERSC), and Olga Shapoval (ATAP).
The ALS staff members always have fun at the OUSD STEM Fair. “It was great seeing kids be excited about science,” Reichel said.