Falling Into Atomville

The Physics and Astronomy colloquium this week was by Jill Linz from Skidmore, talking about a couple of physics outreach programs she's worked on. This being right up my alley, I made it a point to get in early enough to see the colloquium (I spent the morning at home with the sick SteelyKid, and Kate was good enough to come home for the afternoon), before giving an exam in the afternoon.

Linz took a somewhat different approach to physics outreach than a lot of other projects, which tend to focus on high-school students taking physics. She pointed out that if you look at the full student population (including students who drop out before graduating high school), only a few percent of high school students even take physics. With that in mind, she and her students and colleagues made a concerted effort to pitch their program to middle-school kids.

The first project was "Falling Bodies," a play developed for use with a sixth-grade class (you can read an old news release about the project). Students from the local SPS chapter acted out the parts of Aristotle and Galileo, in a couple of silly skits about the motion of falling objects. This was used as the lead-in for an experiment in which the class would repeat Galileo's experiments to show that all objects fall at the same rate.

The project was successful enough, and in demand enough, that it became a drain on everybody's time an energy. To shift some of the load off the faculty and students at Skidmore, they made it into a video (slickly directed and acted by students at NYU), which has been used in 50-odd school districts. Not too shabby.

This led, indirectly, to the second project: Atomville.

The idea of Atomville (the web component of which is just that splash page) is to teach some basics of atomic physics and chemistry through stories about anthropomorphic "atoms," whose daily lives and adventures dramatize bits of science. The main characters are Niles, a nitrogen atom, and Livvy (short for Olivia), an oxygen atom, who are children going to school in Atomville, learning about how to control their electrons and so on.

This project has been developed in collaboration with an animation studio in Hawaii, who are responsible for the nifty images on the splash page linked above. The hope is to produce both a book of stories about the Atomville characters, and also some educational cartoons of their adventures. (Things are a little bit up in the air at the moment, due to the inescapable funding concerns. If you're independently wealthy and would like to help out, Google will turn up Linz's contact information.)

She played the "Falling Bodies" video, and read a bit of the Atomville stories. They were a little broad for my tastes, but then, I'm not exactly in the target sixth-grade demographic. And, really, I'm writing a book based on talking to my dog about quantum mechanics, so who am I to sneer at anybody else's goofy ideas?

Anyway, it's an interesting approach, somewhat similar to the Color Me Physics and Physics Quest programs that the APS Outreach division runs (and Jessica Clark talked about last May). I don't know if Linz has talked to the APS about her projects, and it didn't occur to me to ask, because I was busy thinking about the exam I was giving immediately after the colloquium.