BY COURTENAY EDELHART, The Californian
Corn syrup is added to test tubes during this science lab project on alternative energy at Fairfax Middle School. But it’s not the teacher who is guiding the experiments. It’s a step-by-step video on a computer at a cubicle. Pairs of lab partners watch educational videos and play related video games, then engage in hands-on activities before rotating to the next station. Each station — or module — has a theme such as physics or astronomy, and students spend about two weeks at each one conducting experiments to reinforce what they’ve learned. At the food science module, they beat egg whites mixed with sugar. At the solar power module, they use solar to cook hot dogs. At the rocket science module, they build rockets out of tubes and plastic bottles.
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