Our vision for Illinois as a land-grant institution is to foster accessible, effective STEM teaching and learning—from preschool through graduate education—at local, state, and national levels, thereby preparing a highly able citizenry and diverse STEM workforce to tackle pressing global challenges.
Nobel Project’s End-of-Year Zoom Bash Recaps Learning, Honors Students
Febuary 1, 2021
The STEM Illinois Nobel Project held a special, end-of-the-year Zoom event celebrating its participating students’ achievements on Saturday, November 19, 2021. Showing up for the celebration were many of the roughly 78 Nobel Scholars—middle through high school students (and some of their parents)—who, over the past year, participated in one, or many, of the project’s Saturday Zoom outreach sessions. Part of the Chancellor’s STEM Illinois public engagement initiative, the Nobel Project, begun in fall 2020, has sought to expose participants to Computer Science (CS), CS-related areas, Community Health, Medicine, and even some sociology.
Just what is the Nobel Project? The brainchild of Professor Ruby Mendenhall, who heads up the program, it seeks “to give young people, especially young people of color, unprecedented access to these fields,” she explains, by giving them “tools where they can do life-changing, society-changing things.”
It’s not magic, it’s physics
Musical Magnetism program makes STEM fun, approachable
January 26, 2021
Recently, some Franklin STEAM Academy students walked into their library and discovered that a section had been turned into a physics lab.
On one side of a table were two glass beakers, a tall silver cylinder, and some safety equipment. And on the other side was a magnet, about the size of a hockey puck, floating and spinning above another magnet.
“What the …,” a seventh-grade student said, incredulously, upon spying what he later learned was a superconductor.
Before the student could finish, guest speaker Nadya Mason introduced herself and the day’s lesson. “Today, we’re going to look at what happens when materials get cold. What happens is extraordinary,” she said, piquing their interest. Mason is a Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois and director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC) on the Urbana-Champaign campus.
On Nov. 15, Mason and Pamela Pena Martin, I-MRSEC’s outreach coordinator, were at the Champaign middle school as part of the Musical Magnetism program, which Mason heads.