Click here to see more photos from the workshops.
Even during the summer months, Siena College faculty are still working in the classroom. Two annual School of Science programs bring together Siena faculty, staff and students with high school professors to educate and share their love of science.
The Green Chemistry Summer Institute is a three-day workshop for high school chemistry teachers from the Greater Capital Region. This institute focuses on promoting the adoption of Green Chemistry practices in secondary education science courses by providing teachers greater understanding of the Green Chemistry principles and laboratory exercises. During the three days, the teachers received hands-on experience with a number of Green Chemistry experiments that they can bring back to their classrooms. This workshop is a partnership between Siena College and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation and is run by Siena College chemistry professor Lucas Tucker, Ph.D. and chemical hygiene officer Ann Klotz.
Organized by Matthew Bellis, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics, the Physics at the Frontier workshop is a 4-day program for high school teachers. This year, participants learned about cutting-edge physics research and how they can integrate it into their classrooms. They had the opportunity to discuss the latest particle physics happenings at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, neutrinos and dark matter, as well as the basics of radiation and radiation safety in the classroom. As a hands-on activity, the participants built their own turn-key cloud chambers, a device which allows you to “see” trails left by charged particles from radioactive decays or cosmic rays. The Physics Frontier Workshop was supported by a National Science Foundation grant that supports both outreach efforts and research with the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
