USC Program Promotes Science to Kids

A program at the University of South Carolina is introducing kids to the world of science, in hopes of tackling a shortage of young people entering the scientific field.

USC Biology Professor, Dr. Burt Ely hopes that his SCienceLab program can show kids that science is cool.

“All the students know about CSI and they think that’s great and when we do things that are similar to what’s done on CSI, then they think; ‘Oh, you know, I’m doing something really special,’” said Ely.

And it seems to be working.

“It’s very interesting,” said Mary Perry, an 8th grader at Midlands Math and Business Academy in Columbia.

The 14-year-old Perry says, after attending the program, she’s considering a career as a scientist.

“I think it would be something good for me to do, because as I got older in school I realized that I was good at science and it’s something that I really enjoy.”

The program exposes kids to science, through hands on experience and today the middle-school students were mapping their own D-N-A.

“That’s the basic idea. To let them see that science is more than just lectures and learning strange words and trying to memorize facts, but it’s actually doing things and discovering things,” said Ely.

“To expose students to science and get them thinking about, ‘this is something I could do as a career.’”

He says a new $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health will help the program reach more students across the state, by expanding to Furman and Claflin Universities.

“We had students coming from all over the state, some schools (were) driving two-hours to get here and because we had twice as many requests as we could fill, we’ve developed some partnerships,” said Ely.

“We have a partnership with Furman University and they’re in the process of getting set-up. They’re going to run their first lab right after Thanksgiving.”

The lab at Claflin should be ready sometime next year.

According to Ely, “The kids think this is a really great experience. They get to do things that they’ve never done before.”

So far, more than 21-hundred students have participated in the SCienceLab program.