Lansing School District high school students who participate in Michigan State University’s Upward Bound program spend six weeks of their summer on campus taking academic courses and engaging in educational field trips.
On a recent field trip, Upward Bound students visited the MSU Sailing Center, located on Lake Lansing in Haslett, where they learned not only about sailing, but also about a variety of STEM-related topics including physics, invasive species and the chemical composition of the lake water.
This particular field trip began four years ago when Penny Wali, former director of budget and personnel for the vice president for student affairs and services, took a sailing class six years ago at the MSU Sailing Center. She loved the experience so much she provided seed money to the university to provide the sailing experience to MSU Upward Bound students.
“Most of these students have never been on a boat and would likely never get the opportunity to go on a boat without this program,” said Glenda Hammond, director of MSU’s Upward Bound program. “In addition to the MSU Sailing Center experience, we strive to provide the students with a wide variety of opportunities they would otherwise not have access to, including golfing, educational trips to other states and visiting college campuses across the United States.”
Initially, the MSU Sailing Center experience was meant to provide the students with a recreational break from their summer studies, but during one of the sailing excursions with the students, Ken Warshaw, sports facility professional at the MSU Sailing Center, made a discovery.
“I was skippering the boat with the Upward Bound students one morning and I saw a can floating on the surface of the lake, so I scooped it up with my hand as we sailed by it,” Warshaw said. “On the bottom of the can were several zebra mussels, an invasive species in Lake Lansing. The kids were instantly fascinated by the zebra mussels and started asking me question after question about them. As I answered their questions, it occurred to me that this field trip could serve as a perfect opportunity to teach students about plant and animal life in the lake in a way that is both interactive and fun.”
Warshaw worked closely with Johnnie Eiland, academic coordinator for the program, to put together a curriculum that now allows for the students to learn how and why a boat floats via a physics lesson; to study the chemical composition of the water in Lake Lansing; to view aquatic life under a microscope and to use their math skills to graph the rate of change in the number of zebra mussels in the lake over time. MSU’s Upward Bound program is truly cutting edge in offering this curriculum to its students, as it is currently the only one of its kind in the country.
“This is such a wonderful opportunity to teach STEM principles in a way that get kids excited about learning,” said Diane Spence, mathematics teacher from Sexton High School. “It is inspiring to me to watch the kids applying math and science concepts to real life experiences.”
The Upward Bound program at MSU is a federally funded program designed to help disadvantaged youths, with academic potential, develop their potential for post-secondary education.