Mobile Science Lab Inspires Durango Students

A mobile science lab is hoping to inspire Durango students to look to the stars as a potential career. This edition of the Local News Network is brought to you by Tafoya Barrett and Associates and Happy Pappy's Pizza and Wings. For the third year in a row, students at Riverview Elementary and Miller Middle Schools got a multi-day specialized education in space thanks to a visit from the Mobile Earth and Space Observatory.

And so we have the opportunity here where we get to go out in the classroom. We don't do everything out in our mobile science lab, but we bring stuff into the classroom and do full classes on particular subjects that hopefully get them to understand how we understand these various concepts. And then they can understand really what being a scientist might be.

MESO President Dimitri Klebe created the lab after working at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science watching kids get overwhelmed by the exhibits and losing sight of the intended lesson.

I hope students get a better knowledge of what it is that we're trying to do with science and we need a more scientific, literate public out there because we're facing some challenges of what's going on with this earth. And we can't just you know, read everything we want and believe whatever we want. We have to look at the process of science and how that actually comes to conclusions that we can believe

The MESO Lab visit is funded by a grant from the Durango Education Foundation and the Miller and Riverview PTOs. Eighth grade science teacher Sarah Margoles found the program while looking to fill out her curriculum.

They need to experience it for themselves. They need to do it for themselves and their brains are going a million miles a minute. You need to capture their attention. And for middle schoolers, that can be difficult sometimes. So these hands-on activities do a great job at capturing their attention, grabbing their interests, focusing all of that energy into figuring out a problem.

What the MESO Lab brings is a specific expertise and teaching tools.

One of the things that we we bring is we'll bring a lot of like resources that an individual teacher will not be able to do. So we'll, I didn't mention that when we finish up we actually talk about gravity and stuff and so we bring some exhibit grade kind of displays and interactives that the kids can work with and then we bring a bunch of tools. In this case, we have these little stretchy cloth things that look at the fabric of space and time.

Curriculum included lessons on lights, astronomy, and astrophysics. The Mobile Earth and Science Lab prides itself on reaching an entire community by making its events open to the public. You can learn more about the MESO Lab online and see a schedule of its events on the Facebook page. Thanks for watching the Local News Network. I'm Connor Shreve.