Colorado State’s Little Shop of Physics Receives Â??growing Our Gifts’ Grant from Fort Collins Community Foundation

Colorado State University received a $7,200 grant from the Fort Collins Community Foundation to help the school’s Little Shop of Physics service program enhance its educational television program, Everyday Science, produced in cooperation with the Poudre School District.

The foundation’s Growing our Gifts Fund provided the grant to the Little Shop, an educational outreach program housed in the university’s College of Natural Sciences. Growing Our Gifts, an annual Fort Collins area giving campaign, is a joint partnership between the Fort Collins Community Foundation and the Fort Collins Coloradoan that funds projects in the areas of education, community development, health, human services and the arts.

The Little Shop of Physics is a traveling, hands-on science program based in the physics department at Colorado State. The experiments that form the basis of the curriculum are developed by undergraduate students who assist in presenting the program to more than 15,000 grade and middle school students each year in Fort Collins and throughout Colorado.

"Our main goal is to show children and their families that science is fun, that anyone can do it, and that you don’t need expensive equipment to get great results." said Brian Jones, Colorado State physics instructor and director of the Little Shop of Physics. "This grant will help the Little Shop introduce more area children to the wonders and excitement of science."

In addition to the traveling program and the Everyday Science television show, the Little Shop of Physics also presents instructional workshops to teachers all over the country and occasionally in other countries.

For more information about the Little Shop of Physics, including a sampling of online experiments, visit the Web at http://littleshop.physics.colostate.edu or call Jones at (970) 491 5131.