After being welcomed into schools across Hamilton, Eman Tahir and Hirwa Patel wanted to return the favour by inviting the community to a first-of-its-kind science day on campus.
Months of planning went into the day-long event hosted by Science FUNdamentals at McMaster. The student club was coming off a record year, with 120 McMaster undergrads running science demonstrations for 1,210 students in more than 60 elementary school classrooms.
Patel, a Biomedical Discovery and Commercialization student, started volunteering with Science FUNdamentals three years ago. Tahir, a Life Sciences student, joined a year later.
“For a lot of young children, science can feel kind of scary, and it’s not always something that sticks until later in elementary school,” says Tahir.
“It felt that way for me, I didn’t really connect with science until Grade 8. We want to show that science is fun and that scientists are pretty cool people.”
For Patel, science in elementary school was heavy on theory, with lots of telling and not enough showing or doing.
“I wish there’d been Science FUNdamentals when I was a kid. The club isn’t just about teaching kids – we learn a lot too as volunteers. Kids are curious, ask great questions and notice things we might overlook. It’s a good reminder that science is really about being curious and open to exploring.”
Science FUNdamentals was created by a student group at the University of Alberta, with a mission to enhance elementary science education through interactive demonstrations. The registered charity has since expanded to four other Canadian universities.
Undergrads run hands-on demos that explain the science behind everything from strawberry DNA, hearing and sound to electricity, heat and temperature.
Each demo – designed specifically for young learners with curious minds and short attention spans – comes with learning objectives and minute-by-minute rundowns of each activity so teachers know what to expect.
Together with 30 undergrad volunteers, the Science FUNdamentals student club ran 11 science demos for more than 200 future scientists and their families.
Tahir created the first made-at-Mac Science FUNdamentals demo – a bioluminescence activity that uses glow sticks and paint to explore how and why some animals glow. It’s now been added to the line-up of demos used by students at the other universities.
Along with classroom visits, the University of Alberta team runs an annual SciFun Day with more than 100 demos, lab and museum tours and STEM-related mini-lectures run by students, postdocs, faculty and staff.
Patel and Tahir thought McMaster could do something similar on a smaller scale to start. They made their pitch to their colleagues on the club’s executive and got the green light.
The inaugural event held at the end of the winter term featured 11 science demos run by dozens of undergrad volunteers for hundreds of junior scientists and their families. Patel and Tahir say the free event exceeded expectations and earned great feedback.
Patel is taking over as president of the Science FUNdamentals club at McMaster. She’s already started planning next year’s event, with a wish list that includes more collaborators from across campus and the community, more demos, increased accessibility for all families and science-themed takeaways for kids.
A rental-free space would also let them invest the entire event budget on delivering an unforgettable introduction to the world of science, Patel says.
The Science FUNdamentals student club includes Afeef Vehra (President), William Winarta (Vice-President), Dilakshi Jemeamlouis (External Director), Karina Di Pietro (Social Media Coordinator), Hasan Ahmad (Finance Director), Vedanshi Kapadia (Fundraising Director), Sammi Yang (Activities Director), Eman Tahir (Activities Director), Hirwa Patel (Volunteer Director) and Persephone MacKinlay (Volunteer Director).