One Discovery Leads to Another: An Interactive Summer Workshop on Sensors for Ninth Grade Students

Abstract

A five-day discovery-based summer workshop for incoming ninth graders was designed and conducted at the University of Cincinnati (UC). The idea was to have an inquiry-based, research-driven laboratory experience where students were provided with a mentor who encouraged creativity and inquisitiveness. Over a period of three years, 33 students participated in this UC workshop. The students performed a series of experiments and toured and utilized the analytical instrumentation facilities at UC. During the first year, the goal of the workshop was to have the students design their own chemical sensor for anions in water. In subsequent years, the students were given the opportunity to investigate a research question arising from any of the experiments they performed throughout the week. Students were not given explicit instructions for activities. For example, a typical question could have been “Which anion shows luminescence?”, but they were not told how to discover this. On the last two days the students were tasked with proposing a question they wished to have answered and developed an experiment to test the hypothesis. At the conclusion of the workshop, each group or individual student presented their results and showed confidence in their work.

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