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Last week, students from the Latino Education Advancement Program, a summer program of The Steward School, visited Virginia Commonwealth University for a tour of campus and a fun physics lesson.

A four-week program, LEAP offers full summer scholarships sponsored by several organizations and is targeted to rising eighth through twelfth-grade Latino students. The program provides a rigorous, enriched college-preparatory curriculum in English, Spanish for native speakers, math and technology, with field trips and segments on study skills and English language skills. Latino students take daily grammar classes in both languages, as well as classes dealing with Spanish culture – which helps them to appreciate their heritage, said Yenni Leon, Spanish instructor of the School of World Studies at VCU and Spanish teacher of the LEAP program. The ultimate goal of LEAP is to offer opportunities to Richmond-area Latino youth that enable—and empower—these students to prepare for the future, according to Melanie Rodriguez, director of LEAP.

Forty-three LEAP students received a guided visit to the Cabell Library, the Student Commons and the Cary Street Gym, and then attended two physics lectures with Ulises Reveles, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics, and Robert Gowdy, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Physics in the College of Humanities and Sciences.

Students learned about the elements of the periodic table and Reveles led them in a discovery-driven activity that taught them about water surface tension and the intermolecular bonding that makes it possible for a bug to sit on top of water without sinking and for water to form drops.

Curiosity leads people to new discoveries and has been the driving force for human advancement, Reveles told them. Among the questions the students addressed through Reveles’ prompting were: Why can you fit as many as 60 water drops on a penny before it spills? And do you find the same result with other fluids like alcohol?

In addition, students considered how solutions to Einstein’s general relativity equations using complex models and computer simulations may lead to surprising results, such as finding expanding universes filled with gravitational waves like the Gowdy universes, which are named after Gowdy. LEAP students learned how physics tackles complex problems and offers solutions that help to gain insight in the fundamental nature of the matter.

 

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