Eureka! : Class Puts Mystery and Joy of Discovery Back Into Science

When Mauricio Hernandez’s teacher told the class last week that it was time for science, there was no grumbling. In fact, 10-year-old Mauricio yelled, “Yes!” and waved his arms in the air while his teacher unlocked the classroom door.

The reason for his excitement was GALAXY Classroom, a national pilot program that teaches science using interactive methods, allowing students to discover facts the way a scientist would.

Mauricio’s class is one of three in Hollywood’s Santa Monica Boulevard Elementary School that are testing the program. Santa Monica, one of 40 U.S. schools involved in the project, began testing the $24-million science program in September, several months after taking part in the testing of a similar language arts program.

“Generally, science has been taught from books where students would memorize osmosis. . . . There was a certain experiment and it had to come out a certain way, and if it didn’t you had to do it all over again,” said Mitzi Lewison, a content director for GALAXY Classroom.

But GALAXY Classroom, a series of 15-minute videos developed by psychologists, science association directors and science teachers from around the country, allows students and teachers to be more experimental and to interact with people outside their classroom to discover solutions.

With faxes and phones, third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students and their teachers throughout the country can share clues and solutions to mysteries presented on the videos.

Last week, Mauricio and his 29 classmates sat alert in teacher Janet Howard’s class with pencils in hand, watching “The Case of the Full Moon Bandits” on a TV screen, part of a series teaching students how to use evidence to solve mysteries. The video starts at a reservation trading post, where two people are talking about the Anasazi, a tribe that disappeared about 800 years ago.

After a group of students on the video describe the mystery and some of the clues, they tell students watching it to “fax us with your ideas about what could have happened” to the tribe.

Once the video is over, the students discussed the clues and tried to come up with answers. “I think there was a big earthquake and the land opened up and they went in,” said Miguel Banaca, 12.

Howard, who has taught at the school for 18 years, said she marvels at the children’s interest and involvement in the program. “I use it every day. I think it’s the best program I’ve ever used. They can’t wait for the next show.” She said her students have done better on standardized California tests since she the school became involved in the program.

Evidence of the students’ enthusiasm is that when the video ends, three girls run to the bulletin board to find out when the next installment will be. They jovially push each other out of the way until one girl prevails, puts her finger on the date, smiles, and runs back to her seat.

Each video has a hands-on experiment for the class to do and a project the student can take home to work on with his family, Lewison said.

“Instead of trying to get the ‘answer,’ we say, ‘Look, kids, there are many different solutions.’ From there they are coming up with solutions of their own,” Lewison said.

And each video provides a number of different lessons. For instance, one of the videos in the series on gathering evidence introduces students to the practice of fingerprinting. Howard’s students took home plastic bags containing ink, fingerprinting paper and a magnifying glass to take their family’s prints. One student fingerprinted her identical twin brothers and reported that their fingerprints were different.

“It gives parents something more to do with their students than ask them if they did their homework,” Howard said.

Not only do the videos aim at improving students’ performance in science, they also aim to improve attitudes about the subject, and to make teaching it more exciting.

The pilot program, funded by Hughes Aircraft Co. and several national foundations, could be available for the 1994-95 academic year if enough schools become interested, said Norman Arvech, a Hughes Aircraft engineer who was involved in the project. The cost could be as low as $35 per student per year, he said.

“It’s a dream of ours to make a first-rate project happen,” he said.

And that is what he sees happening. Students and schools fax each other as many as 1,000 times a day, he said.

“It’s beyond belief; it’s all kids want to do. They’re running back from the playgrounds to do it,” he said.