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With no reference, just her memory and her hands, Fiona spent an hour last week meticulously crafting a clay figurine of virtual Japanese pop star, Hatsune Miku.
She made the legs by rolling them out and sticking them to a clay base. With the help of a skewer, she attached a body to the legs and a head to the body. Finally, she made two ponytails and stuck them to the side of her creation’s head, finalizing the silhouette of her favorite digital idol.
Fiona is a sixth grader at Crittenden Middle School, and before she got her hands dirty, she and two of her peers learned about the chemical structure of clay and the stages of ceramics, from greenware to stoneware.
Fiona participates in lessons and activities like this one almost every Friday as part of a chemistry class run by Mountain View Whisman’s school board President Bill Lambert, retired biotechnology professional Sunai Raillard and Mountain View High School senior Aiden Noh. Next week, assuming Miku survives the kiln, Fiona will have the chance to glaze her creation.
The class is part of Crittenden’s Beyond the Bell program, which provides underserved students with free after-school activities and homework support, said Juan Villanueva, who leads Beyond the Bell at Crittenden.
Lambert and Raillard, who both have postgraduate degrees in chemistry, started the course last spring as a way to give students more hands-on experience with science.
“Science is very beautiful,” Raillard told the Voice. “You can use your logic as well as your creativity.”
Every week, students interact with chemistry concepts physically, rather than just theoretically. By structuring the lessons this way, Raillard hopes to make learning about chemistry more engaging and appealing.
“My main goal is not to get a PhD-level chemist out of these lessons but to get these students excited about science so that they will continue on this path,” Raillard said.
The idea of the class is for students to come week after week so that they can build on the knowledge and skills they pick up during different lessons, Lambert said. He wants to get more students involved in the afterschool class, adding that once a student is enrolled in the Beyond the Bell program, it’s easy for them to sign up.
Arjun, an eighth grader in the class, said that his favorite experiment was one where the class performed a silver mirror test with Tollens’ reagent, which made a clear liquid turn into a metallic silver coating inside a test tube.
“I like hands-on experiments because I’m able to do things that I imagine in my mind,” Arjun said. “I get to be creative.”
Lambert explained that he and Raillard were brought up during a time when there was a greater emphasis on physics and chemistry, which he believes are the fundamentals of science.
“I would love to see us get back to teaching chemistry and physics,” Lambert said. “It’s important for our society. It’s how we are going to solve problems.”
