Probing the surface of a world one million times smaller than we can see, or observing the center of our galaxy 93 million miles away, Carolina scientists are using technology to bring science into schools and place it into students’ hands. By all accounts, the students are learning something. And so are the scientists.

Rich Superfine, Gail Jones, and Russ Taylor helped Hillsborough high school students access an atomic force microscope through the nanoManipulator. The SOLAR program led by Wayne Christiansen debuted this spring in classrooms across the state, allowing students to use the telescope in the Morehead Observatory. In both cases, telecommunications technologies allow high school and middle school students access to expensive, unique equipment on Carolina’s campus without ever setting foot in Chapel Hill.

Moving a Virus

We went to the lab and played with a virus. I talked to a man from UNC-CH. It was so cool! It made me want to be a scientist because it was so fun.”

Mike Byrd is a student at Orange High School in Hillsborough. He wrote those comments following a visit by a group of Carolina scientists, professors, and graduate students. During the three-day program, students used nanotechnologies developed at UNC-CH to explore and manipulate actual viruses under an atomic force microscope in a lab back on the Chapel Hill campus.

Jones, professor of education at Carolina, has supervised the two visits to Orange High-one in the spring of 1998, and a second one in December 1999-spending as much as six weeks at the high school to orchestrate the visiting science investigation.

I can say for sure from both of these studies that students are developing a more three-dimensional conceptualization of viruses,” Jones says. “Before they viewed viruses as flat, just an outline, with no real understanding of the morphology of a virus.”

The nanoManipulator has moved students by allowing them to move viruses.

In the course of a week, I have learned so much,” Orange High student Lisa Punt wrote of the experience. “Coming into this experiment we knew so little about viruses, and now we can describe their size, some of their characteristics, and how viruses infect you and make you sick. The visiting scientists have inspired me and so many others to join a field in science. They have lit a flame that cannot be put out.”

During the last visit, students rotated between three stations, including one where they interviewed the scientists and had the chance to ask anything, personal or professional. But one station clearly stood out: using the nanoManipulator. Becoming one of only a few hundred people to use the technology caught each student’s attention, but the ability to push, poke, and feel an adenovirus is what kept it. Communicating with graduate student Garrett Matthews in the nanotechnology lab in Chapel Hill through videoconferencing, Superfine and Taylor instructed the Orange High students about the nanoManipulator, about adenoviruses and, more importantly, about science. Superfine is an associate professor of physics and astronomy; Taylor is a research assistant professor of computer science.

It was shocking, but we asked them if they ever had a scientist come out to their class-ever-and they said no,” Jones says. “They have significantly changed their views of science and scientists and their attitude about what science is. They said, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that physicists and computer scientists work with people in education and biology. This is really interesting, this is really cutting edge. It’s not boring at all.’”

Superfine, who admits that attracting students to the science program at Carolina is one of his selfish motives, will don an outrageous tie-dyed shirt and cart along movie posters from 1950s horror flicks to illustrate the science. Explaining the issues of scale needed to experiment with something as small as viruses, Superfine points to an old movie in which a giant ant terrorizes a city.

It’s a matter of connection. The Carolina professors hope to connect the high school students to the technology, to the field of study, and to the idea of science as a career.

If you ask them why does an artist do what they do, they would probably say because an artist wants to do it,” Superfine says. “But I don’t think they viewed science as an activity motivated by passion, as having the same motivation.”

We did a lot of ‘hands-on’ activities,” Raven Munkres wrote. “I think that really helped us to comprehend all of the information given to us. I enjoyed my experience learning about viruses. It opened my mind to a possible new path to a career as a scientist and gave me a definite new outlook on viruses.”

 Sky-high

While the nanoManipulator allows students access to the tiniest scale, the SOLAR program (Students Online As Researchers) introduces students to an other-worldly level of observation, allowing them to take digital pictures of the sun some 93 million miles away. To do this, middle and high school students control the telescope at the Morehead Observatory using computers and the Internet, focusing it on certain locations of the solar landscape to capture images of sun spots and solar prominences (seen as bumps on the sun’s surface). By providing the excitement of controlling the telescope, Christiansen hopes to send the students’ interest in astronomy sky-high.

I’m big on the idea that, especially in science, students should not attempt to learn science by listening to lectures, or even by looking at videos on computers,” says Christiansen, director of the observatory and professor of physics and astronomy. “I really do believe that all the talented scientists that I know are people who are basically tinkerers, hands-on people who mess around with stuff. So the whole conception of SOLAR was to be this hands-on idea. Yet it was to be done remotely.”

On a winter Saturday morning, teachers from around the state gathered at the Morehead Observatory to learn how to incorporate the SOLAR program into their curriculum. Teachers from Troutman, Swannanoa, Carrboro, Fayetteville, and Eden listened to Nancy West describe how to take measurements from the screen images captured by the telescope’s electronic camera. West, coprincipal investigator with Christiansen, traveled from the College of William and Mary in Virginia for the weekend seminar.

Through Internet communication, the teachers will be able to instruct students on guiding the telescope toward the sun and capturing their own images. Web cameras will show the students how the telescope moves in correspondence with their directives. Then the students will conduct one of a half-dozen experiments written by the SOLAR program leaders. By combining their own data with the data from students at other schools taken in past sessions, they’ll be able to track the movement of a particular sun spot and calculate the speed of the sun’s rotation.

I think the important thing is that it’s not cookbook, it’s not all set up for them to get the right answer,” says Andy Dinardi, a Ph.D. student in astronomy who has been involved in the SOLAR program since the start. “It’s whatever they get. Science is all about doing experiments.”

These outreach programs rely on technology and advanced instruments to grab the attention of the intended audience, but it’s up to the professors and graduate students involved to engage the students.

Can you believe they actually let us, high school students, use this expensive equipment?” Thomas Miller wrote. “To put it in plain words, it was the trippiest experience I have ever had.”



Mark Briggs was a student who formerly contributed to Endeavors.

Coming soon to a town near you, it’s Destiny-the science bus, or Traveling Science Laboratory. Biology Professor Skip Bollenbacher has outfitted a 40-foot bus with science labs and computer and satellite technology to bring hands-on experiments to classes that aren’t equipped for such excursions. In the next issue of Endeavors.