Alfred Olivas, a STEAM Education Outreach Coordinator, knelt in front of a table holding a shallow tray of water, took a deep breath and squeezed a tube of paint. A drop of purple pigment burst across the surface. He continued to drop in different colors, which repelled each other to varying degrees. Then, he blew through a straw to tease the colors into different directions, creating a marbled effect that could be transferred to paper.
Olivas was demonstrating an art technique from Japan called suminagashi for a room of planetary scientists, astrobiologists and educators participating in a professional development workshop at the Planetary Science Institute Feb. 4-6. The objective was to share and practice skills that will help experts engage kids and families in NASA science and exploration.
Olivas explained that the activity should be followed by participants scouring their artwork as if they were maps of planetary surfaces and marking fictional geological features.
Planetary Science Institute’s Sanlyn Buxner hosted the workshop as a member of Planetary ReaCH, short for Resources and Content Heroes, which develops and hosts workshop like this across the country. The ReaCH facilitation team also included Alexandra Matiella Novak of Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory, as well as Christine Shupla and Yolanda Ballard of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.
Participants discussed and modeled engagement strategies, conducted hands-on activities and co-created a public engagement event in collaboration with the JVC Boys and Girls Club of Tucson, a local youth-serving organization, for real-world experience.
This workshop aimed to help scientists become more intentional and authentic when engaging local youth and families. The voices of educators were central throughout, as they shared their experience and expertise working within their local communities.
The group met after their outreach event and reflected.
“You might not have thought the kids were engaged the whole time, but they sat there for a long time and chose to stay when they could have easily gone to the game room,” Buxner said. “They were incredibly engaged. It was also really powerful that they were just with a scientist for an hour.”
Buxner also stressed that when it comes to kids, having fun as they engage with scientific topics and scientists can be just as impactful as learning facts. If a kid has fun while engaging with science, minds can change, and they’ll carry that with them forever, the group agreed.
Case in point: One little girl told a scientist at the outreach event, “Maybe I like science now.”
