Hear back from Taylor Kuo about her collaboration with Flavourful Science. Taylor’s project was focused on getting young students interested about STEM through food. Taylor was a recipient of the Centre for Community Engaged Learning’s Connect to Community Grant in the 2022-23 school year. You can find her full report here.
Applications for CCEL Grants are open until Sunday, February 4, 2024 at 11:59 PM PT. Learn more about our grant funding here.
Could you please tell us what your project is about?
The goal of this “Spicing Up Science” trip was to provide young students with an opportunity to be inspired, excited, and interested in STEM through engaging lessons about a variety of scientific concepts using food – a relatable medium. Together with Flavourful Science, our team of volunteers provided interactive and educational workshops to over 200 students at two elementary schools in Lillooet, British Columbia. These rural elementary schools have students belonging to visible minorities and minorities of STEM, from members of Indigenous communities to young women. Young elementary school students in the aforementioned communities may be unable to explore their interests in STEM; our activities provided these individuals with eye-opening, free workshops to showcase the opportunities and enjoyment that STEM provides. By going on this multi-day trip with Flavourful Science, our goal was to motivate, inspire, and provide learning opportunities to rural BC elementary students about the
wonders of STEM.
What impact has working on your project had on rural youth in BC?
As the teachers in Lillooet mentioned, there is limited access to these resources in their community and our workshops were able to give rural community students the opportunity to explore different aspects of STEM. Additionally, I think our project had a significant impact on rural youth as some students expressed that they wanted to be like us when they grow up, while others expressed a desire to pursue careers in science following our sessions.
Have you been using the project learnings in your current work?
The financial, leadership, collaborative and planning skills that I developed during this project will be practical for my future work experience and volunteering. Since I will still be volunteering with Flavourful Science in the future, I will be able to use these skills to help train future volunteers, lead more classrooms, as well as plan more visits to future schools. I will be able to
better budget finances for Flavourful Science as well as for other aspects of my life as I will be able to work more seamlessly with others through my experience with this grant. I am very appreciative for the opportunity to have received this grant and I hope that our lessons made a valuable contribution to the community.
Did you encounter any challenges? If yes, how did you overcome them?
During my project, the first challenge was selecting which rural city to visit. Upon sending emails to several schools in Lillooet and Cache Creek, I initially received no responses in the first months. However, I persisted by following up with the schools and received interest from two schools in Lillooet. Another challenge my team and I faced was catering our lesson plans to a younger demographic. As the lesson plans were initially created for students in Grades 4-7, teachers in younger grades expressed interest in us teaching their students when it was announced that we were going to be visiting their school. To address this issue, our volunteers modified the lesson plans based on the age group of students by having some lessons in less detail to accommodate the younger students. The principal also had us perform shorter lesson plans for the younger students due to their shorter attention spans which was a success. The last challenge I had was gaining media release forms from all the children, as it was difficult to get the whole school to sign the forms and return them in time for our trip to Lillooet. To combat this issue, I had children with signed forms sit together at one table to make it easier to take photos and videos of the children whose guardians gave consent.
What was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned throughout the duration of your project?
It was really heartwarming to hear that the elementary school children in Lillooet were learning the Salishan language as well, because they would say ‘thank you’ to us in their language at the end of the lessons we were teaching. Before this trip, I thought that only French and English were taught in schools in BC, so it was amazing to hear them speaking another language.