CSU Little Shop of Physics Teams Up with Oglala Lakota College This Week at Pine Ridge Reservation

Note to Reporters: A photo of a previous trip to Pine Ridge is available with the news release at http://news.colostate.edu.

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

Students from Colorado State’s Native American Cultural Center will join student volunteers from the Little Shop of Physics this week to travel to schools on the reservation. The Little Shop of Physics program engages young students with experiments that use everyday objects to demonstrate scientific principles. This is the fifth year Native American Student Services has joined the program to visit the area.

The Little Shop of Physics will partner up with the Math and Science Department at Oglala Lakota College to present school programs and teacher workshops, including a workshop titled “Ten Things You Should Know about the Atmosphere,” based on work with CSU’s Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes or CMMAP.

“We’ve been working with OLC for the past several years,” said Brian Jones, Little Shop of Physics director. “They’ve developed a set of hands-on experiments that are based on projects we’ve developed, and our programs will be joint efforts, with some of our equipment, some of theirs.”

In 1991, Jones founded the Little Shop of Physics with the goal of demonstrating that science is exciting, interesting and accessible to all. The Little Shop crew is composed mostly of undergraduate students who find creative ways to share the wonders of science and present unique hands-on experiments to a diverse range of students. The program serves as a resource tool for K-12 teachers in Colorado and in the region with regular trips to the Four Corners region and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during college holidays.

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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