From Elephant Toothpaste — to nearly 19,000 miles on the odometer.
That’s how it’s going these days at WVU for an intellectual road-trip exercise designed to bring fun, hands-on lesson plans to middle school students across the Mountain State.
It’s known collectively as the Technical Assistance Center for Science, Technical, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics — STEAM-TAC, for short — which is all about motivation by way of motoring, Donna Peduto said.
Peduto, a former teacher who was also a reading specialist in her classroom days, is the executive director of the West Virginia Public Education Collaborative, which helps manage the program through WVU and the state Department of Education.
What makes the program famous, she said, are those aforementioned driving excursions across the state.
“We bring the learning to our kids,” she said.
The idea, Peduto said, is to show that science, or any technical pursuit in school, doesn’t have to mean humorless people in white lab coats, writing equally humorless lab reports at the end of the experiment or research project.
That was in full evidence in December 2021 at Mountaineer Middle School, when Dr. Frederick Bertley came in with a team from Columbus, Ohio, to show just what STEAM-TAC can do.
Bertley is the face of the Center of Science and Industry, a popular hands-on museum and learning lab that has captivated central Ohio kids and students from all ages across the region for 50 years.
He’s an immunologist whose work in vaccines and preventive medicine from the Canadian Arctic to Sudan.
That’s a pursuit that’s quite serious, but on this cold December day, in a lab at the school high atop Morgantown on Price, he was flat-out having fun.
Even if the experiment was on chemical catalysis.
Especially because the experiment was on chemical catalysis.
He gave a grin and eye-roll to the students and others in the audience, including Peduto.
“Don’t try this at home,” he said.
“Well, actually, do try this at home, but just at this volume. It is kind of messy.”
The aforementioned “elephant toothpaste,” he meant — with its serious, chemical catalysis imparted in a slapstick-science kind of way.
Here’s the recipe, if you want to make your own:
Take ordinary tap water, dry yeast, liquid dish soap, food coloring and hydrogen peroxide.
Swirl it all together.
The foamy concoction that shot out of those big beakers in tube shape at Mountaineer Middle was wide enough, and thick enough, for an elephant’s toothbrush — if there were such a thing.
What was really bursting that day, Peduto said, was a new avenue in learning for West Virginia.
“These are the lesson plans that students remember,” said Peduto, a former teacher who was also a reading specialist during her days in the classroom.
“Kids get excited about science when they see experiments like that. They get excited about learning.”
Last year, the program’s four STEAM-TAC specialists drove 18,500 miles on West Virginia’s interstates and country roads, delivering lesson plans such as the above to 11,950 students, the director said.
The road trips took in 96 schools in 47 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, she reported, and the summer of 2022 was just as busy.
More than 12,000 middle school youngsters on 33 schools in 11 counties were STEAM-TAC students then, she said.
And just like Elephant Toothpaste, the program is expanding.
“We’re going to start going out to the high schools,” Peduto said. “Full STEAM ahead.”
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