Schools

Argonne Welcomes Hispanic Students for Educational Outreach Day

Students visited the lab and performed experiments as part of Hispanic Heritage Month.

Spectrophotometers can be seen frequently in the background of crime scene investigation shows.

But students from Chicago’s UNO Charter School Network on Tuesday got a much more kid-friendly introduction to the device, used to determine a substance’s composition based on the wavelength of light it reflects.

While visiting Argonne National Laboratory as part of Hispanic Heritage Month, the kids used spectrophotometers to determine whether the orange dye that colors Skittles is the same formula used for M&Ms. (It's not.)

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The experiment was just one of several investigations the students conducted during their daylong visit, aimed at exposing them to the variety of career options available in the sciences.

“There’s often a lot of community support for kids (from underrepresented groups), but what is lacking is information on positions of power such as lawyers, doctors and scientists,” said Mike Kaminski, president of Argonne’s Hispanic and Latino Club and coordinator of the Hispanic Educational Outreach Day. 

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Although the outreach day originated about seven years ago, the partnership with UNO began two years ago when school administrators approached Kaminski about ideas for career day activities. At that time, the Darien-area lab’s Hispanic and Latino Club was just an internal organization.

Kaminski spoke at an UNO career day event, and the relationship between the groups blossomed. 

Today, the club gives advice on what lab equipment UNO should purchase, offers college scholarships to top students and invites four students from each of the nine schools to visit Argonne during the annual outreach day.

This year, the students experimented with the spectrophotometers, powered hair dryers by riding a bike and created miniature polymer replicas of the Jefferson Monument.

Eighth-grader Christopher Guevara, who attends the UNO Network’s Carlos Fuentes School, said he plans on attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study science. 

His favorite part of the day was examining the M&Ms and Skittles. 

“You can actually see the (light) wavelengths and say, ‘That’s the color green,’” he said. “Not a lot of kids get to do that.” 

The benefits are mutual. Argonne education specialist Patty Zriny said she loves showing the students the complexities of scientific research—including the role of failures in advancing discovery.

The first time the students in her workshop tried to make the polymer model of the Jefferson Monument on Tuesday, they ended up with a small lump of plastic.

“I love showing them we don’t know everything,” Zriny said. “The first thing we made today was mush. How cool is that?”

There’s also a more global benefit to exposing kids of diverse backgrounds to science, Kaminski said. Recruiting scientists from many different backgrounds is a critical component of innovation, he said.

“It doesn’t matter what minority group you’re in,” he said. “Innovation often comes from diversity of backgrounds. If you’re not tapping into those backgrounds, you’re missing out on an opportunity unique to America.”


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