Colorado State University Little Shop of Physics to Visit Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Jan. 10-13

A group of Colorado State University students will spend part of their winter break, Jan. 10-13, on an educational outreach tour showing children on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation how science can be fun.

Four students from Colorado State’s Native American Cultural Center will join five student volunteers from the Little Shop of Physics to travel to schools on the reservation in Hermosa and Porcupine, S.D. The Little Shop of Physics program engages young students with experiments that use everyday objects to demonstrate scientific principles. This is the third year Native American Student Services has joined the program to visit the area.

The group will visit Red Shirt Table School in Hermosa, S.D., on Jan. 11, and Porcupine School in Porcupine, S.D., on Jan. 12. Pine Ridge Reservation is home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Accompanying the students are Brian Jones, director of the Little Shop of Physics, and Ty Smith, director of the Native American Cultural Center.

"It is very important to introduce science and technology education to these students and their communities," Smith said. "These students need to know they can succeed in these academic areas, and that can best happen through a positive experience with hands-on experiments developed by the Little Shop of Physics. We are very supportive of any program that will inspire children to become more inquisitive of scientific fields."

Each visit to the schools involves hands-on science experiments for children and after-school workshops for teachers to enhance their curriculum.

All experiments were built by undergraduate students at Colorado State. The heart of the Little Shop of Physics is its traveling program that has visited more than 250,000 students in the past 18 years. Each year, Little Shop visits about 40 different schools and presents programs to about 15,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade.

For more information about Little Shop of Physics, visit http://littleshop.physics.colostate.edu. For more about Colorado State’s Native American Cultural Center, visit www.nacc.colostate.edu.

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