(510b) Adhesion Forces At Work: Daughters and Parents Working Together to Learn About Interfaces

Over the last four years, the graduate students in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at Cornell have organized a popular outreach program for 10^th grade girls and their parents from rural areas to further their interest in STEM fields and provide an early start on college planning. The day-long program includes six hands-on lab modules, college admission information sessions, and a talk highlighting STEM career opportunities. The lab modules focus on teaching college-level concepts that the students are unfamiliar with, such as DNA extraction, packing fractions, and surface tension. A unique aspect of this program that was developed this year was a new parent and daughter laboratory module based on discovering and exploring interfacial phenomena. In this module, the daughters and their parents work together to conduct hands-on experiments that are designed and led by graduate students. During the session, we used i<clicker technology to collect data in real time from the parents and the students to assess learning outcomes. Additionally, we collected feedback forms to determine opportunities for improvement. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the entire program, present some of the experiments developed for the parent and daughter lab session, and discuss detailed feedback from students and parents about the session.