University earth science departments seeking to establish meaningful geoscience outreach programs often pursue large-scale, grant-funded programs. Although this type of outreach is highly successful, it is also extremely costly, and grant funding can be difficult to secure. Here, we present the Geoscience Education Outreach Program (GEOP), a…

We report a practical home-made microcentrifuge to be used for teaching purposes. It was made using a salad spinner and two polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tubes racks. It can accommodate 2 standard size 96-well plates or 24 strips or up to 192 microfuge tube. The centrifuge is hand-operated and is ideal for short spin down purposes. (Contains 3…

Given limited funding for school-based science education, non-school-based programs have been developed at colleges and universities to increase the number of students entering science- and health-related careers and address critical workforce needs. However, few evaluations of such programs have been conducted. We report the design and methods of…

The Akamai Workforce Initiative (AWI) is a program that seeks to develop a skilled local STEM workforce to meet the needs of Hawai'i's growing high-tech industry. Launched as an internship program in 2002, AWI is the result of a long-term collaboration among the University of California Santa Cruz's Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators…

In this invited autobiography, the author describes the impact that educational gaming and simulation has had on his professional career. He begins by reviewing his early life and education in Aberdeen and his subsequent work as a research scientist, schoolteacher, and physics lecturer. He then shows how he changed disciplines from physics to…

This article describes how to design program assessment for mathematics departments, in two-year and four-year colleges across the Midwest, based on a set of components that was generated from a Delphi survey. An example is provided to illustrate how this was done at a small four-year college. There is an alignment between these components and a…

This article describes the design and implementation of a workshop on teaching and learning for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in a Faculty of Science at a major Canadian research-intensive university. The approach borrows heavily from an existing successful workshop for faculty but is tailored specifically to the needs of GTAs in science in…

Freshmen Pre-Orientation Programs (FPOPs) can be powerful outreach tools for incoming college students and provide an exciting introduction to the field of engineering. The benefits reach not only the first year students, but also the upperclassmen who help to run the programs and the departments that sponsor them. A family of three engineering…