Joan Chadde, jchadde@mtu.edu Director for Science & Environmental Outreach
Greetings, members of the ECM community! We hope your spring semester is off to a great start. As you continue to look for potential National Science Foundation or other state and federal agency funding, you will likely come across the need to incorporate K-12 education / outreach in your project proposal.
I’d like to introduce you to the work of the Center for Science & Environmental Outreach (CSEO), which has a wide range of experience developing and delivering K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs, along with many environmental education programs. These are for students and teachers in Houghton County, the western U.P., statewide in Michigan, the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes region, and some programs are even disseminated nationally, such as the Family Engineering Program!
Established in 1991 and wholly grant-funded, the Center offers programs focused on enhancing the teaching and learning of STEM for K-12 students, teachers, and community members. The Center’s diverse programs include Outdoor Science Investigations Field Trips, Family Science & Engineering events, After School STEM Classes & Summer Camps, Water Festival, Girls & Engineering and other programs to increase under-represented students in STEM, K-12 teacher professional learning, and Western UP Science Fair & STEM Festival. Programs are created and delivered by the Center’s education staff and we also partner with Michigan Tech faculty who wish to conduct modules/short courses/etc. with our target audiences. The Center’s programs engage ~15,000 students, teachers, and community members annually so it is a great place to broadly disseminate your hands-on / interactive ideas!
And the good news is that you don’t need to figure out logistics! The Center has a menu of education / outreach ideas with an estimated cost for each. These ideas should pique your creativity and then you can set up a meeting with CSEO staff to customize an offering to your research broader impacts.
The Center is located at the Great Lakes Research Center where it takes full advantage of the learning lab/classroom and other spaces to deliver a wide range of programs. There are 4 full-time staff with a range of experiences, from science, social studies, environmental education GIS, technology, geoheritage, citizen science, and organizing large and small events. The Center’s expertise way outpaces the links on this page: https://blogs.mtu.edu/cseo/