Science and creativity went hand in hand at University Hill Elementary School thanks to researchers from the Toney Group and graduate students from the Theatre & Dance Program. The collaborative project taught third graders about STEM subjects through art, music and dance activities.

Emma Antonio, a postdoc in the Toney Group, was interested in how art and movement could be used to communicate scientific concepts to elementary school students.

“The goal was to focus on curiosity, play and creativity,” Antonio said. “By inspiring children to explore science in the world around them, I was keen to challenge conventional ideas about what science is and who it is for. I was also excited to provide ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder students with an opportunity to engage with young people, build an interdisciplinary community across campus and develop skills outside the lab.”

She reached out to the Theatre and Dance Program and connected with graduate students Katerina Lott and Christina Mitchell. The group then contacted Mary Powell and Becca Spence of University Hill Elementary, who teach art and music, respectively. Antonio won a ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Outreach and Engagement community impact grant for the project.

Together, they developed what would become the Elementary Arts Lab.

“Christy Mitchell and I were the artists of the group, working with our friends from the science side,” said Katerina Lott, a second year MFA student in the Dance program. “We wanted to create a truly blended curriculum that explores art and science together — using art to explore and embody science concepts, and using science to inform and provoke our art-making.”

The group developed a series of lesson plans for third graders to explore science concepts including atoms, light and color, sound, states of matter, the scale of atoms to galaxies, weather and the water cycle.

“This was a unique experience for students as they have missed many learning opportunities due to the restrictions of COVID,” said Mary Powell, art teacher at University Hill Elementary.  “They were eager for activities that were beyond the usual scope of third grade and were eager to meet the ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder students and use technology as a bridge between their learning world and that of the scientists and dancers.”

Powell saw the Elementary Arts Lab as a way to challenge students to consider their perspectives and thoughts about science, dance, movement and art.

“Working with the dance students and teachers was such an enriching experience as we generated ideas, shared our expertise and delivered the sessions together,” Antonio said. “As well as the all-round excitement about the project, I was delighted by reports that the children were ‘not just learning science, they were thinking like scientists’ as well as comments from ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder students who felt that thinking about topics in new ways had improved their own understanding.”

The group taught nine lessons to 75 third grade students during the spring 2021 semester. Antonio, Lott and Mitchell were joined by science and engineering students and postdocs Elizabeth Allen-Cole, Tom Chaney, Luis Kitsu, Andrew Levin, Trisha Nickerson, Lacey Roberts and Nick Weadock. Together, they introduced the concepts to the students, and teachers Powell and Spence would continue to explore the concepts over the course of the week.

“It was really wonderful to see the children responding to and getting excited about what we were bringing in,” Lott said. “I have a lot of experience teaching children, particularly in an elementary school setting, so I was excited to join the project. I am also very passionate about advocating for arts education in public schools. I am very inspired by our mission, a big part being to challenge stereotypes and preconceptions about what a scientist or an artist is, and who can be a scientist or an artist.”

Professor Michael Toney of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering lauded the Elementary Arts Lab.

“I am exceptionally proud of the ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder postdocs and graduate students for their innovative outreach to the Boulder Valley School District [BVSD] elementary schools to foster interest in STEM through the use of dance and art,” Toney said. “This is a wonderful demonstration of the impact that a group of talented and passionate ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder postdocs and students working with teachers can collectively have in the broader Boulder community.”

In the fall, the group worked with BVSD to develop resources on energy and waves for all 75 fourth grade classrooms. The lesson plans meet the national Next Generation Science Standards and have also been translated into Spanish for bilingual learners.

Sara Nelson, a curriculum developer with the Strategic Initiatives department of BVSD, praised the collaboration.

“The lessons created by the Elementary Arts Lab group are innovative and creative ways for kids to explore rigorous science concepts in the way kids do it best: with their whole bodies and minds,” Nelson said. “I can’t wait to see how our fourth grade teachers use these enriching resources this year.”

The Elementary Arts Lab is currently looking for more opportunities to collaborate with teachers and young students, and is seeking to expand its team of artists and scientists. Learn more about the program here. 

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Single use plastics represent an environmental challenge that researchers at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering hope to address.

The proliferation of plastic products has created an environmental challenge: what should be done with unusable, discarded plastic waste that can harm the environment? Faculty from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering are working on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, , to address this serious environmental issue.

Denver Business Challenge Endowed Professor Will Medlin, James and Catherine Patten Endowed Professor Ryan Hayward, Assistant Professor Kayla Sprenger, Professor Michael Toney and their respective groups are collaborating on this project, which the NSF is funding through a $2 million grant.

“Figuring out how to deal with post-consumer plastic waste is a major societal problem,” Medlin said. “We were all independently interested in working on this problem, but were approaching it from different angles. Ryan is an expert on how plastics are formed and could be degraded, Mike is an expert on developing experimental tools to understand the interfaces between materials that arise in chemical upcycling of plastics, Kayla is an expert on computational modeling studies of similar interfaces and my group works on catalysts for depolymerization.”

Given the complexity of the problem, the researchers decided to combine their diverse yet complementary approaches to address problems in chemical upcycling. The Medlin group has been working on the conversion of biomass-derived polymers to renewable products for the last several years.

“Although plant-made polymers are certainly different from man-made plastics, some of the essential catalyst processes are quite similar,” Medlin said. “You’re trying to break apart a macromolecule into specific units that can be made into useful products. Extending our work to plastics upcycling made sense based on the group's general focus, and students are highly motivated to work on this critical environmental problem.”

The Hayward group will work on characterizing how the polymers in question are catalytically deconstructed — specifically how the polymers interact with the catalyst support surfaces and how the polymer chain lengths evolve as the reactions proceed.

“Enabling a shift to a more sustainable use of polymers, where the vast majority are recycled or converted to higher value products rather than being discarded after a single use is one of the most important challenges facing materials scientists today,” Hayward said. “We were very excited about the opportunity to join this team and to be able to work towards a very promising route toward deconstructing polymers into high value products.”

Toney said that his group will contribute research that focuses on the interfacial interactions between the catalyst, support and polymers as they react. This will require the development of new 'operando' experimental tools to observe the reactions in real-time.

“My research is largely motivated by helping to solve the sustainability challenges facing humanity by helping to develop new materials and processes,” Toney said. “Eliminating plastic waste is one such challenge perhaps most popularly seen by reports of ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ This is my first research effort aimed at helping the team develop more effective methods to eliminate plastic waste.”

Medlin also credited Adjoint Professor Gregg Beckham as being a key part of the team. Beckham, who also works at NREL, will be contributing his expertise in plastics upcycling and conducting technoeconomic analyses of the processes the collaboration develops. Professor from the University of South Carolina will also conduct quantum mechanical simulations to understand the atomic-scale interactions between plastics and active catalysts, which will complement the Sprenger group’s efforts.

This grant was funded through the NSF Directorate for Engineering’s .

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