An army of one

I am constantly amazed by how much one person can achieve in a super short amount of a time. All because of the huge leaps technology makes everyday. I will give you an example.

On Tuesday night I decided that it was time to learn a little about advertising. I had my reservations about it as its an ugly field (in my opinion), but turns out that the stuff is fascinating! I looked up the top reviewed books on AMAZON (as I also believe that you can teach yourself anything from a book), bought some on our KINDLE, looked for ones that were not available on the Kindle at the USC library, and went and got the books first thing in the morning. I flipped through and read a couple, going online perodically and reading more about specific ad campaigns and by Friday evening (minus half a day off for Thanksgiving), I had some neat ideas about how to do our own campaign. And this was totally starting from scratch with no prior knowledge of advertising.
Cost < $25 (if you dont' count infrastructure).

Here are some other programs we use that multiply our efforts a thousand-fold.

We have an ADWORDS grant from google whose potential I realize more and more everyday. It took me a while to get used to it and I started with baby steps - making a few ad versions at a time, adding 5 or 6 keywords and monitoring the meager "click throughs". Then I discovered "Target Locations". You can click on ANY continent, ANY country and make it your target location. I got excited and added all european, north, latin and south american countries (limiting myself only by shipping costs). Then realized that I only spoke english and would have to wait until I could make image-only ads. That is coming soon too.
Oh well. I will just stick to Canada, US, England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia and India.
And then there is the Keyword tool! Now I don't have to rack my meager brains and guess what other people type in for science education, but just put it into the "keyword generator" and out pop 2000 relevant keywords - homeschool, abeka (????), 6th grade science, middle school science (apparently everyone doing science is in middle school), science fair ideas, free lesson plans. As easy as pie! (or is it pumpkin pie, apple pie, pie in the sky, graph, data, pizza slice, pastry, turnover, 3.142?)

How about your cool website you ask? :) Thanks for asking! I use another one-woman-enabling-show program called JOOMLA to make our website. Its a bit clunky, but miles better than Dreamweaver.
I needed to make a "Donate" button and have a whole checkout process (so that the public can rise to its feet and support us one and all!). I was intimidated by what was involved (and also had a million other things to do) so tried to outsource the work. We put an ad on Craigslist for a Joomla developer and another detailed ad on "Rent-a-coder" (sounds cool doesn't it??). Well.. I got 5 million emails from people all over the world telling me what rock stars they were. None of them bothered to read my specs. So I decided to take things into my own hands and pound away at the good old keyboard and internet. Turns out website developers may go out of business soon because there is GOOGLE CHECKOUT. Just copy and paste the code into the right spot. Any dummy can do that and I did.

And then there is YOUTUBE. I take tons of short (5-10 sec) videos from our sessions. Clean them up using WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER, add titles (if I have time) and then upload them onto youtube and then onto our website. It takes roughly an hour. Just imagine how many people it would take 10 years ago to do the same.

Lastly (and this is the reason for this inspired entry).... GOOGLE EARTH. I am going to apply for the Geo-Challenge grant and as a result of that, need to learn how to use Google Earth (nice move Google!). But seriously! It is amazing! I was fantasizing earlier how cool it would be to have a time map of all the sites we have been at and now its possible to do just that. I spent half a day in dread, hoping a tiny wizard would come and do it, but then after staring at the Spreadsheet Mapper for a while, it looked less grouchy and now I have this cool video of the sites (using another awesome tool called CAMSTUDIO!)
Check it out here. This is just the first pass (and only for our LA sites, we have some in East Palo Alto, Salinas and Newark, NJ). We are going to make it 4D and show no. of participants reached at each site etc.

I can't wait to see what cool new toys next year will bring! Maybe my cat will be able to do all what I have been!

Family Science - what works!

I read about a really interesting school called the Open Classroom in Salt Lake City, Utah where parents are required to volunteer 3 hours per child per week. Many schools all over require this parental involvement, but rarely are the parents required to help teach, develop lesson plans and lead small group discussions and learning. I was intrigued by the idea and as almost every LAUSD school has a parent center and a parent coordinator on the federal payroll, I decided to take advantage of this and see if parents could be more meaningfully involved in their child's education. That is how the concept of Family Science Courses came about.

The goal was to have Family Science Sessions at night (not just one night as most schools do), but a whole series of 5 or more (depending on the topic). The courses would be taught by engineers and would have an interesting overarching story such as cardiovascular mechanics, structural color, animal locomotion, sports science etc.
The audience is elementary and middle school Latino and African American children AND their parents. Both the children and parents conduct experiments and learn science together. Our biggest challenge was parent recruitment and after 12 Family Science Courses we are beginning to develop a formula that ensures strong parental participation (~25-30 families).

So here is our secret checklist :)

1. Present a short video showing parents and children doing science together from previous sessions. We have been presenting this video at Back to School Night so that a large audience sees the information. They are then more likely to remember us and make the connections when we send the parent invitation letter back home.

2. Ask the parents! If you have any questions, just ask! So we decided to do that and surveyed parents at 6 different schools (charter, magnet and regular).

3. Show videos and pictures about the topic to all the students (from a particular grade) - so that they have a better understanding of what will be taught and how cool it is :)

4. Hand out flyers and parent invitation letters to the students so that they can
RSVP back. One surprising tactic that worked very well this fall was to have single-sex courses.


We had been awarded an AAUW grant to conduct sessions for only girls and their parents and surprisingly the turnout was very strong. I think it was mostly due to the fact that we presented only to the girls (and that had never happened at the two schools before) and the girls were quivering with excitement to have been specially chosen for this program (over the boys).

5. Make reminder phone calls. Initially I was paying a few bilingual undergraduates to make weekly calls to the parents, but my main problem with that was that it wasn't scalable. Now, we have high school interns (who facilitate during the sessions) make just one initial phone call. Once the parents come, they are hooked and need no reminding.


We used all five steps this fall and the sessions were a resounding success. We conducted two courses on Animal Locomotion at Trinity and Shenandoah and one on Sports Science at Foshay.

Here is a video from the session on viscosity. Participants learned how bacteria and copepods move using "sticks and strings". They then had to design their own copepods to see which design would sink the slowest in karo syrup.

This video shows the participants learning about thrust by designing balloon cars.

Stay tuned for our next post on measurements of change in content knowledge and interest. Get excited (as Kara says)!