Teens Recruited for Science Challenge

January 22, 2010

An aquatic science challenge in Southern California that is sponsored in part by USC reached a new audience of middle school and high school students this year.

The recruiting campaign for the 2010 edition of the QuikSCience Challenge attracted applications from student teams at 69 schools in Los Angeles and Orange counties - a 250 percent increase from the number of schools that registered for the event in 2009.

The QuikSCience Challenge is a competition for teams of middle school and high school students who create projects and portfolios on a science subject related to marine or freshwater environments.

The challenge is sponsored by the USC College Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies in partnership with Quiksilver Inc., an international producer and distributor of surfing apparel, and the Quiksilver Foundation.

The higher recruitment for this year's challenge was the result of more networking and promotion, said Lynn Whitley, director of pre-college education for the Wrigley Institute.

"We did more advertising this year so more teachers and students knew about it," Whitley said. "We worked with the Orange County Department of Education, and we met teachers last fall at the California Science Education Conference in Palm Springs. Word-of-mouth publicity has helped too. The challenge has been around for seven years, and teachers and students are starting to hear about it from their peers."

This year's event attracted the attention of teachers and students in 37 high schools and 32 middle schools, primarily from districts in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Some registrations came from farther away, including one from students at a high school in Hawaii.

Students at Kamehameha schools on the island of Oahu will submit their challenge electronically. They heard about it from their teacher, who previously taught at schools in San Diego County, and their participation will test the use of the online environment as a way to widen the geographic coverage of the QuikSCience Challenge in the future.

The challenge uses a team competition to spark the interest of middle school and high school students in science and in marine and freshwater environments and to enhance the students' capacity for leadership. This year's competition has 98 teams registered, and it might involve between 500 and 600 students. Their projects are due Feb. 19, and awards will be announced March 25.

Every team that submits a complete project is eligible for a one-day trip to the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, and the winning teams will receive trips of three to seven days to the Catalina Island campus.

The QuikSCience Challenge had some new offerings to get students more involved in the project from the very beginning.

The sponsors offered a "Surf and Science Day" on Nov. 11. More than 100 students and teacher chaperones visited USC for tours of campus and a few research laboratories, and the timing of their visit gave them a front-row seat for the USC Homecoming Parade.

Ryan Ashton, director of the Quiksilver Foundation, attended the event and held a raffle.

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