Colorado State University Little Shop of Physics Visits Four Corners Region March 16-18

Note to Reporters: A video on Little Shop of Physics is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99owQZni0Ew.

Colorado State University students will spend part of their spring break, March 16-18, on an educational outreach tour showing children in the Four Corners region how science can be fun.

Students from Colorado State’s Native American Cultural Center will join student volunteers from the Little Shop of Physics to travel to schools in Ignacio, Colo., and Kirtland, N.M. The Little Shop of Physics program engages young students with experiments that use everyday objects to demonstrate scientific principles. Watch a video highlighting Little Shop’s recent open house at Colorado State University at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99owQZni0Ew.

On Wednesday, March 16, the group will visit Grace B. Wilson Elementary School in Kirtland, N.M., where they will spend time with students from 8 a.m. -1 p.m. with students followed by a teacher workshop from 1:30-3:30 p.m.

The students will visit the Southern Ute Education Center in Ignacio all day on March 17 and 18. A teacher workshop will follow the student visits from 4-5 p.m. on March 17.

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 20 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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