Family Science Saturdays: Our primary resource for enhancing science and mathematics education is our own employees. The desire of many of our employees to offer a program to young children led to the Saturday morning activity of Family Science, a series of hands-on science workshops for 3rd to 5th grade children and their parents.

For 2008, topics include Kitchen Chemistry, Polymer Science, States of Matter, Algorithms, Introduction to Electronics, and World Wide Web (WWW)Page Design.

Children are selected from local elementary schools in the districts where the IBM volunteers live. The primary goals are to expose the children and their parents to science and to demonstrate the relevance of science to the students' lives. To reach a larger audience than the modest number of students who attend our workshops, we ask these children to discuss the workshop activities with their teachers and then share their workshop experience with their classmates in school by conducting a workshop in class.

For those who have attended the Introduction to Electronics class, here is some additional information in html format or in format.

To reach still more students, local Girl Scout troops and local school districts select Peer Teachers - high school and middle school students - to attend our sessions, where they assist the IBM instructors and learn the techniques of hands-on science teaching. These students then conduct workshops for Brownie Troops and in elementary school classrooms in their own districts. The older students are a resource for elementary school teachers who need help in science teaching. Additionally, this exposure to the joys of teaching encourages the peer teachers to consider teaching as a career option. The elementary school students who are taught by these high school and middle school students experience science learning in a fun-filled, non-threatening environment.

Copyright IBM 2008