“I was out in the field on the island with the team for part of last summer,” Harkness says.
Lorentyna Harkness and Lynn Mazzoleni sat down with Michigan Tech reporter, Danny Messinger, to talk about our outreach activities for this project. Here’s an excerpt of the story.
Written by Danny Messinger
If you ask an eighth or ninth grader what a scientist really does, you’re likely to hear plenty about wearing lab goggles and white coats, watching bubbling beakers, and preparing microscope slides. But besides surface-level attributes, many students have trouble explaining what being a scientist actually entails.
That’s exactly the issue Lorentyna Harkness aims to tackle. Harkness is a high school science teacher earning a master’s in applied science education at Michigan Technological University. As part of her degree program, she is teaming up with Tech chemistry and physics faculty to break complex scientific principles into bite-sized chunks for teenage students and to clarify what scientists actually do. And that’s music to Lynn Mazzoleni’s ears.