At Stanford University, what started as a small outreach event to one local high school has now become a multifaceted program bringing together not just graduate and high school students, but also high school teachers and college instructors from around the bay area. IFS: Inspiring Future Scientists in Chemistry is aimed at exposing students to graduate school, scientific research and the steps to becoming a scientist. The program mobilizes graduate student volunteers who bring novel hands-on guided inquiry lab experiences to local high schools. Working side by side with high school students, they instill an appreciation for how chemistry is critical to decisions that we make in the 'real world' and ignite an interest in young students to pursue futures in the sciences. These visits prompted a strong interest in additional opportunities, which lead to the creation of a new summer shadow program in which high school students are invited to campus to spend two weeks in several different research labs, during which a strong emphasis is placed on safety practices. To further leverage resources and impact a longer lasting change on the experimental labs available within these high schools, we have also created a summer program for high school teachers called ChemEX2. Chemistry Experiences and Experiments for Learning (ChemEX2) is an eight-day professional development program for high school chemistry teachers offered by the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET) and hosted by the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University. The program not only shares these guided-inquiry activities with teachers, but empowers them to create their own student experiences that promote chemistry as an exciting and inquisitive science. Together, these programs gain efficiencies from and strengthen one another to better improve student experiences in the classroom and promote an excitement for chemistry in the real world.

Inspiring future scientists in chemistry: Leveraging resources that bring together high school and graduate students as well as teachers

248th National Meeting (2014)

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