The year 2020 will forever be remembered as a season of pandemic teaching due to rising COVID-19 infections. Institutions of higher learning abruptly changed from in-person to online in attempts to minimize COVID-19 spread. Due to this, we created and taught online cell biology labs in response to the COVID-19 campus shutdown. Our virtual cell…

In his introduction to the science shows feature in "Primary Science" 115, Ian B. Dunne asks the question "Why have science shows?" He lists a host of very sound reasons, starting with because "science is fun" so why not engage and entertain, inspire, grab attention and encourage them to learn? He goes onto to state that: "Even in today's…

Creating inquiry activities is inherently difficult. Asking meaningful questions requires both background knowledge on the part of the students and complexity on the part of the phenomena. Yet numerous strategies can help teachers conduct inquiry activities. In this article, the authors share a taxonomy of teaching strategies used to create…

The laboratory the author had been assigned for his RET (Research Experience for Teachers) at Vanderbilt University is new and different from the one he had previously experienced. This summer he was assigned to the Microfluidics and Lab-on-a-chip laboratory to help research dielectrophoresis. As this is an emerging technology, there was not a lot…

Often science teachers perform demonstrations only to discover that students have already seen the experiment in a previous course. Teachers should take advantage of these opportunities to showcase the interconnectedness of different science disciplines. One example of a demonstration used across most science disciplines and grade levels involves…

A wonderful way to engage science students is to make them think a demonstration is not turning out the way the instructor intended. Basically, throw a little humor into teaching, and they will be hooked. Described in this article is a demonstration that uses Milk of Magnesia (MOM) as a visual and humorous method to review equilibrium chemistry…

Three articles focus on many classroom activities and experiments inspired by the voyage of two canoes, built of traditional materials, from Hawaii's Hilo Harbor in 1995. Nationwide, students followed daily satellite tracking, accessed the Internet for updated accounts of the canoes, talked directly with navigators, and watched television…