Discover UGA: Helping Communities

Flashes and Bangs Service-learning course designed to reach and teach budding young scientists is just one of the Discover UGA features this month on the theme of Helping Communities:

The course is designed to combine and develop different skills of the students.

“When we started the shows, as part of the grant, Nick Barker, who is an outreach professional, was the lead presenter who explained the science and concepts, while my research collaborator and I were doing the demonstrations,” Ullrich said.

For the course, the students are paired in groups of two or three, and while one is explaining the science, the others serve as their assistants in fulfilling the demos. “So for each topic there is one main presenter with one or two assistants. They switch roles and at some point everyone serves as a main presenter.”

At the beginning of the course, Ullrich provides the students with broad topics — astronomy, condensed matter physics, nanotechnology and material sciences, atomic and molecular physics, geophysics, earth and environmental sciences, and medical physics. The students then select specific topics that interest them and discuss some of the latest scientific discoveries. “It’s like a journal club. Looking through scientific literature and having discussions on the research.”

Find other May Discover features here. The University has many to touch the lives of Georgians across the state and these are just a few. Great faculty work and terrific, multi-facted engagement from our students. Good people doing great things.

Image: Physics graduate student Lenny Shenje uses a small flame to explode a gas-filled balloon for students in the Thomas Lay after-school program. (Dorothy Kozlowski/UGA)