Girls just want to have fun: WINS science group scores victory with latest field trip to Amherst

Galvin Middle School earth science teacher Katie Birtwell said that while there is nothing wrong with reading a textbook, being able to have a hands-on learning experience can add that extra element of “excitement” for her science students. 

Mariel Schottenfeld, back right, shows WINS girls the dinosaur tracks at a quarry in South Hadley.

With this in mind, Birtwell leads the Canton chapter of the Blue Hill Observatory Science Center’s Women in Natural Science Program (WINS). Geared toward middle-school and high school-aged girls, this group aims to “keep girls interested and involved in science” through various enrichment activities. 

It is this emphasis on hands-on learning and bonding with other girls that attracts Canton youth to WINS.

“Instead of looking at a textbook, we go out and learn in a more independent, free-thinking environment,” Grace-Mary Burega, an eighth grader at the GMS, wrote in an e-mail to the Citizen. “At school you can only skim the surface of the subject, but WINS allows girls to dig deeper into different areas of science. We aren’t just memorizing definitions like in school; we are applying past knowledge to problem solve.”

“I feel very much ‘at home’ amongst the other members. They’re family to me,” Beck Prigot, a senior at Canton High, wrote in an e-mail. 

Prigot is older than some of the other members of WINS, but she said she enjoys the chance to mentor the other girls — something Birtwell feels is one of the key aspects of the program.

“The older girls are helping to teach and encourage the younger ones, and hearing something out of a teacher is one thing, but hearing it from a girl that is maybe just a few years ahead of you, I think makes a bigger impression,” Birtwell said.

This was certainly the case last month, when one of Birtwell’s former students, Mariel Schottenfeld, a 2005 graduate of CHS, helped to organize a field trip to the Amherst area for WINS. 

Schottenfeld, 23, gradated from UMass-Amherst last year and has since been working at the Physical Modeling Lab at UMass under the instruction of Professor Michele Cooke.  Cooke thought it would be a great idea to have the WINS girls come out to Amherst and meet some female earth scientists and visit various labs and museums.

On Sunday, April 18, the WINS girls traveled to Amherst and spent almost 12 hours touring the area and taking in the region’s geology and learning about earthquakes, volcanoes, rocks and minerals and dinosaur fossils. 

A busy day included a stop at the Physical Modeling Lab where Cooke and Schottenfeld, who spend much of their time researching the San Andreas Fault, showed the girls how thrust faults formed by conducting a deformational sandbox experiment.  The girls then got a chance to literally smash rocks, putting the cores of four different types of rocks into a pressure ring and seeing how much force it took to break them.     “Seeing science at work in real life on these trips is awesome,” Samantha Emhardt, an eighth grader at GMS, wrote in an e-mail. “It proves that science is used every day for almost everything. We also get a better idea of how things work and what they are used for on these trips.” 

The paleontology portion of the trip was a big hit amongst the girls.  Schottenfeld took the WINS group to the Natural History Museum at Amherst College, which has the largest collection of dinosaur footprints in the world. Here the girls learned about the dinosaur footprints, how they were made and how paleontologists analyze them.

Pranathi Ganni, an eighth grader at GMS said that her favorite part of the trip was learning how to make these “simple observations” about different fossil trails.

The final stop on the trip was to Nash Dino Land in South Hadley where the girls were able to see in situ dinosaur footprints — footprints in their original state and location, something that surprised some members of the group.  

“I never knew fossils were up here in Massachusetts,” Emily Buckley, an eighth grader at the GMS wrote in an e-mail. 

“Before this field trip I was interested in science and this made me even more in to it,” Mansi Sharma, a ninth grader at a charter school in Marlboro, added in an e-mail. 

One of Schottenfeld’s goals for the trip was to get the girls to think about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of science. “Too often students are just taught to know something is the way it is because someone else said so,” Schottenfeld wrote in an e-mail. “Here, they got a taste for how geologists and other scientists came to the conclusions they have.” 

She pointed to an example of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and how the girls going into the trip knew that this type of dinosaur was a meat-eater and predator, but did not know why. On the trip, they saw the steps a paleontologist takes to determine a dinosaur’s diet. Birtwell said that seeing Schottenfeld in action is the “best reward a teacher can get.”

“Teachers do a lot of teaching, but to know that they are heard and that some of the excitement that students might have picked up in your class is carried through by the student into their own lives — that’s very powerful,” Birtwell said. 

The WINS program was created in 1999 and offers these field trips at no cost to the students. Stephanie Radner, the WINS program coordinator, said the goal of the program is to “create positive and permanent changes in the way that young women experience science and technology, thus leading to increased confidence, self-worth, and academic success.”

Radner, who accompanied the Canton girls on the Amherst trip, said that in her experience when girls are separated from boys they “slowly come out of their shells.”  

“Early on, they are shy, reluctant to ask or answer questions, self-conscious, etc.  After a few meetings, or even after an hour or two, the transformation is amazing,” Radner wrote in an e-mail. “The girls become more confident; they are passionate and enthusiastic, they laugh and sing songs together, they act exactly like girls who are not doing science.”    

WINS is a program of the Blue Hill Observatory Science Center, a nonprofit organization dependent on donations from foundations, corporations, and individuals to continue their operations. For more information, visit www.bluehill.org.

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Posted by Jeffrey Pickette on May 6 2010. Filed under Features, News, Schools. Both comments and pings are currently closed.