Students from Joe Cook Elementary School lined up around the table in the Pohl Gymnasium on Mississippi University for Women’s campus Wednesday, watching a machine that resembled a Ferris wheel rotate to conduct electricity.
William Sutton, a Monticello native and a senior at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, put one hand on the machine, and one of the children agreed to do the same. Sutton told the rest to step away from the table.
“It’s not going to hurt, but we’re trying to focus as much electrical energy between this circuit,” Sutton said.
The elementary students watched with rapt attention as the boy that volunteered felt a sudden electric shock by touching fingertips with Sutton as the machine turned. He and his fellow students laughed and hollered as he shook the feeling out of his hand. The girl who went next laughed even harder when the shock popped between her and Sutton.
The static electricity station was one of eight science-related stations at the annual MSMS Science Carnival on MUW’s campus Wednesday morning. Others included demonstrations of inertia, the metric system, chemical compounds and how to interact with animals.
The event hosted second- and third-grade students from nine area schools. Seven came from within Lowndes County: Joe Cook, Fairview Elementary, Stokes-Beard Elementary, Sale Elementary, Columbus Christian Academy, Heritage Academy and Franklin Academy. Students also came from West Clay Elementary School in Cedarbluff and Reform Elementary School just across the border in Alabama.
MSMS is a public boarding school on the MUW campus for juniors and seniors in high school from all over the state who show particular skill and interest in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The school has held the science carnival for the past two decades, and between 800 and 1,300 elementary school students attend every year, MSMS biology teacher Bill Odom said.
The entire student body of about 230 participates in the event, whether they interacted directly with the children at each station, serve as greeters and guides for the visiting teachers and students, or set up and clean up the gym before and afterward, Odom said. The students that worked the stations took shifts during the five-hour event.
The school instructs its students on how to effectively teach the kids, and many already MSMS students volunteer at Boys and Girls Club or tutor Franklin Academy students, Odom said. He also recruits students to help put on the Mississippi Regional Middle School Science Bowl every year.
“It helps for them to be involved in trying to talk to these younger kids and realize the challenges of that directive,” Odom said.
Sutton also showed the younger students a magnet composed of a nail wrapped in wire and attached to batteries at both ends, which he used to pick up paper clips. Giving children a foundational explanation of scientific processes like electricity earlier in their lives will make it easier and less intimidating for them to learn those things down the road, Sutton said.
“It creates an education system where kids learn as they grow, which is what we need,” he said.
‘Something that will spark an interest’
At the microbiology station, the kids were told to touch small pom-poms covered in lotion that glows under ultraviolet light, representing germs on dirty surfaces. They used hand sanitizer and saw under the UV light that not all of the “germs” were gone, MSMS senior and Starkville native Linda Arnoldus said.
Arnoldus was a guide at last year’s carnival but wanted to facilitate a station in order to interact with the children more directly this year, she said.
Another station showed how the chemical compound sodium polyacrylate absorbs water to become waterlock gel, and another demonstrated the difference between hydrophilic and hydrophobic materials, which determines how they react to contact with water.
Unsurprisingly, the children were most excited to visit the veterinary station, where fourth-year Mississippi State University vet student Anne Elise Hertl had brought her two dogs, a black terrier mix named Ginger and a golden labrador mix named Bjorn. The children were taught how to safely approach an animal and gauge its demeanor, Hertl said.
The MSU vet station became part of the Science Carnival a few years ago, clinical instructor Cooper Brookshire said.
“We’re really interested in mentoring at the vet school, and right now vet students teach MSMS students about veterinary medicine, and MSMS students teach the elementary students,” he said.
Cook Elementary’s science curriculum includes “a lot of hands-on activities,” but the Science Carnival exposes them to things they wouldn’t see in their own classrooms, third-grade teacher Tamra Harrison said.
“They would never get to do this, so it’s definitely something that will spark an interest if they didn’t already have one,” she said.
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