LAUSR

Despite the prevalence of polymers in modern everyday life, there is little introduction to the topic in science education throughout primary or secondary schooling in the United States. Of the few states that do include polymer education, this is only found at the high school level, primarily in biology or chemistry. Over the past year, we have developed a graduate-student-run outreach initiative aimed at providing young students with an understanding and appreciation of this class of materials through the interactive teaching of polymer science with audience-appropriate language. Our lessons are developed to align with the Michigan State Education Standards (Michigan is an NGSS Lead State Partner), such that each lesson can be adapted to the vocabulary of the classroom, even across different grade levels and school curricula. Most importantly, each of our lessons has multiple hands-on activities to reiterate and reinforce the concepts taught through active learning. In teaching our graduate student volu...