Education Program
The CLS has an education program - "Students on the Beamlines" - funded by NSERC Promoscience. This outreach program for science allows high school students to fully experience the work of a scientist, in addition to having the chance to use the CLS beamlines.
"The program allows students the development of active research, a very rare phenomena in schools and provides direct access to the use of a particle accelerator, something even rarer!" said teacher Steve Desfosses form College Saint-Bernard, Drummondville, Quebec.
Dene students from La Loche, Saskatchewan have taken part in this program twice, looking at effects of acid rain. Student Jontae DesRoches commented “Elders have noticed that the landscape, where trees used to grow, there’s none growing anymore. They’re pretty concerned because wildlife is disappearing. Like, here there used to be rabbits and now there’s none”. In May 2012 three student groups were at the CLS simultaneously, with the La Loche students as the first to use the IDEAS beamline.
“The aim for the students,” according to CLS education and outreach coordinator Tracy Walker, “is to get an authentic scientific inquiry that’s different from the examples in textbooks that have been done thousands of times.” Students from six provinces as well as the Northwest Territories have been directly involved in experiments, some of which have yielded publishable-quality research.
In 2012 the CLS was awarded the Canadian Nuclear Society's Education and Communication Award "in recognition of its commitment to community outreach, increasing public awareness of synchrotron science, and developing innovative and outstanding secondary educational programs such as Students on the Beamlines".
Read more about this topic: Canadian Light Source
Famous quotes containing the words education and/or program:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Music is so much a part of their daily lives that if an Indian visits another reservation one of the first questions asked on his return is: “What new songs did you learn?””
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)