<a name=top>Science Kit in the News

Science Kit in the News - Science Kit

Press Releases

Science Kit Announces Science Education Partnership Program

Science Kit Meets CSI In The Classroom (from: Newsday.com)

Science Kit Announces Addition of Online Science Library

Science Kit Aligns Teacher Developed Product Line to National Science Education Standards

Science Kit Adds Over 1,000 New Products

Back to Science Online Table of Contents

Science Kit Announces Science Education Partnership Program

Science Kit, a leading educational science supplies company that has been serving the elementary, middle school and high school communities for nearly 50 years, announced today the launch of a new partnership program aimed at science museum websites, school and teacher websites and other science related non-commerce sites.

“The program is very simple,” said Affiliate and Partnership Program Manager David R. Williams, “Any museum, school, teacher’s group or other science related site that wishes to join the program can do so. Member sites drive traffic to the Science Kit e-commerce site. If their traffic purchases something, the referring site receives a commission of between 10% and 15% of the merchandize total. This is a great way for cash strapped organizations and schools to make some easy money while promoting science education.”

All any interested website has to do is send an email to David at dwilliams@sciencekit.com. “I typically respond in 24 hours tops,” David said, “If a potential partner contacts me on Monday, we can have them up and running by that Friday in most cases.”

Websites that are accepted into the program place banner and/or text links on their sites which link to www.sciencekit.com. Each referring website is given their own unique bit of tracking code that is tacked on to the end of the url.

“For example, if the Buffalo Museum of Science posts a link to our homepage on their site, the url would be http://www.sciencekit.com. But, with the tracking code, that url becomes http://www.sciencekit.com&sid=bms. We track the sales they generate on this end and at the end of each month, we ask them to submit an invoice for their commission. We have a $25.00 commission threshold, which means that a partner must generate $25.00 in commissions before we will cut them a check. Anything smaller is just an accounting nightmare for both of us and them.”

The program is also open to individuals who have their own non-commerce science sites.

Although the program was only officially announced today, partners already include the aforementioned Buffalo Museum of Science, the Society of Amateur Scientists, and Bright Science.

back 2 top

# # #

When It Comes to Enthusiasm for Science, High Schools and Colleges Find Crime Does Pay

By Mary Vobril, Staff Writer, December 14, 2004

When Babylon High School students showed up for their "Living Environment" lab one day last spring, they couldn't get in: bright yellow "Crime Scene Do Not Enter" tape crisscrossed their classroom door.

Inside, near microscopes, lab benches, dissection tools and other effluvia of high school science were bags of "evidence" relating to the suspicious death of a 22-year-old fashion model.

In the hall outside, teacher Richard Villanueva met his students and said a few words appropriate to the occasion - chiefly, "Don't contaminate the evidence." Then he tore down the crime-scene tape, class having begun: a weeklong unit on forensic science themed to the death of the make-believe model. The unit offered five hands-on labs in one: analysis of blood, hair, fibers, fingerprints and handwriting, a suicide note being of doubtful authenticity.

On top of the trend

Rudimentary it may be, but the high school's foray into forensic science is part of what the National Science Teachers Association calls the "hottest new trend in science teaching." Suddenly hip, forensic science has invaded the nation's classrooms with tsunami-like intensity, fueled by a parallel flow of forensic science in popular culture.

At the competitive Bronx High School of Science, forensic science students have a somewhat more sophisticated curriculum. In recent semesters, units have focused on such subjects as "body fluids," "aging human remains," "nuclear DNA vs. mitochondrial DNA" and "the chemistry of fire." Students have taken field trips to the New York State Police Academy and the Albany Crime Laboratory. The school even published an online magazine on forensic biology.

A key stimulus to student interest, teachers say, is the wildly successful "CSI" franchise, which this year aired its 100th episode. The gritty, slickly written CBS drama has spawned "CSI: Miami," "CSI: New York," and the new-this-season "NCIS." Court TV has "Forensics Files" and "I, Detective."

NBC helped launch the trend nearly 30 years ago with the popular "Quincy, M.E." series, with Jack Klugman as a crime-fighting coroner, and it now offers "Crossing Jordan," a prime-time show about a medical examiner and her work.

Bestselling authors, of course, have been centering their plots on forensic science since the days of Arthur Conan Doyle. Two of the more recent to capitalize on the often-grisly particulars of the field are Sara Paretsky, creator of the VI Warshawski detective series, and Patricia Cornwell, whose crime thrillers feature Kay Scarpetta, forensic pathologist.

The classes themselves might be called life imitating "art" that itself was inspired by life, chiefly by such voyeuristic cases as the O.J. Simpson murder trial, which helped make DNA a household word. So pervasive is interest in forensic science, in fact, that it has invaded summer camp curricula. Last summer, the science-oriented Center for Teaching and Learning in Central Islip offered Island-wide summer enrichment programs in forensic science for grade-school kids.

It's geek chic. "In high schools, it's really taking off, big time," says Lawrence Kobilinsky, president of the Council of Forensic Science Education.

Even at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, which has offered forensic science courses throughout its 40-year history, undergraduate enrollment has nearly doubled in the past five years, says Kobilinsky, the school's associate provost, himself a forensic scientist.

Who would have believed it: Science ... rocks.

"It adds excitement to science," says Julia Rankin, director of science for the New York City Department of Education. Life Sciences High School and A. Philip Randolph High School in Manhattan, Town- send Harris and John Bowne high schools in Queens and Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences in Brooklyn are among city schools offering programs in forensic science, says Rankin, adding that most already have them or are moving in that direction.

A student demand

"It's something the kids are asking to learn more about.... The CSI shows almost pushed the curriculum," she says. They've also pushed some students to form after-school forensic science clubs.

"It's like the chocolate covering the pill," says Court TV senior publicist Barry Rosenberg. "It's making kids have fun while they're learning science." Rosenberg spent the past two years taking the cable network's forensic science workshop, now in its third season, to the nation's high schools. Students typically have to figure out who trashed their cafeteria, laden with kid-friendly clues and such memorable props as fake vomit and fake blood.

"Remember the Bunsen burner test, where you put a chemical on a stick and it would turn different colors? Well, now the kids can use that to test for 'poison' in a coffee cup, or something along those lines," says Rosenberg. "They kind of forget that they're learning."

By all accounts, teachers like it, too.

"It's neat. Fun, not work. I truly enjoy teaching this unit," Babylon's Villanueva says of the week he spends on forensic science. Grades even tend to shoot up during the unit. "Students enjoy the practical aspect of science and the whole idea of the mystery, of solving the 'crime,'" just as they've seen actors do on television - typically in 42 riveting minutes.

"They don't think what they're doing is science," says Bernadette Black, who teaches a full-year forensic course at Northport High School. "But it's all science," its relevance to students apparent: "Their whole attitude toward science might change when they see the practical application."

TV shows skip some 'ughs'

For all their glamour and high-tech appeal, however, forensic science shows go easy on certain unsavory realities, Villanueva points out. When some leggy investigator in tight jeans and a low-cut top examines a decomposing corpse, for example, "you don't get things like the smells." Same with the initial appeal, for some insect-lovers, of forensic entomology, which uses insect infestation to determine such matters as probable time and date of death.

Still, the shows certainly influenced college student Stephanie Inscore, 24. After 9/11, a real-life forensic scientist whose name she can't remember talked up the profession. Their paths crossed on Staten Island, where he worked on World Trade Center remains and she was a volunteer with the Salvation Army.

Now she practically plans her life around the shows, she says - and she's a sophomore studying toward a criminalistics degree at John Jay.

At the college level, science electives usually are "not enormously popular" among non-science majors, says James Spencer, professor of chemistry at Syracuse University.

Yet, when Syracuse began offering forensic science as an elective in spring 2003, "it sold out by the second day of registration. Every seat in the lecture hall was taken, and there are 200 seats," Spencer says.

The first day of class, Spencer pointedly told the 200 students that if they expected a gut course, so to speak, they were in the wrong place. Though he does include a relevant film clip from the 1992 film "My Cousin Vinny," he warned the class that "'We're not going to watch 'CSI.' We're going to talk about real science - infrared spectrophotometry, serology, mass spectrometry.'" The students were "hard-core non-science majors, and I expected a third to run away. But last year, out of 200, we had a dropout rate of ... three."

Science for non-scientists

No longer was science what Spencer calls "big, bad, scary stuff" to the non-science major. "I was thrilled."

At John Jay College, Kobilinsky began seeing an uptick of interest in the field with "Quincy, M.E." and then again in 1995 with the long-running Simpson murder trial. Then came CSI, which debuted in September 2000.

"If you look at our enrollment figures - and this is the bottom line here - over the last five years, I would say the undergraduate program has approximately doubled in size, going from about 450 to about 875," Kobilinsky says.

"And the only reason it hasn't tripled in size is very simple: We don't have space. There aren't enough laboratories and there aren't enough faculty to mentor these people."

The master's program also has grown: "There are 90, 95 graduate students, up from 65 or 70. But we're maxed out. We can't go too much beyond that."

The Simpson trial, he says, served as a benchmark in college-level forensic science courses.

"That was a critical time," he says. "Before O.J., you could count the programs, both graduate and undergraduate, on both hands. It was, like, 10 programs. Nowadays there probably are about 50, 60."

Apart from the glitzy allure provided by top-ranked television shows, "there is something about the field that is very, very attractive," Kobilinsky says.

"You mix with police, you have this official status, you get to see things that normal people don't, like crime scenes. And autopsies.

"It's different, kind of like medical but not fully medical. And when you watch 'CSI,' that puts it over the top."

Which creates a problem for a public college such as John Jay, part of the egalitarian City University of New York.

"This will maybe amaze you," Kobilinsky says, "but the attrition rate over the first year is severe. Probably between 75, 80 percent. A lot of kids come in and have no idea what it's really about." At John Jay, "it's basically pre-med for the first two years."

The best background for a would-be forensic scientist, he says, is high school chemistry.

Forensic science textbooks at the high school level already exist and more are on the way, says Kobilinsky, co-author of the 2004 college text "DNA, Forensic and Legal Applications." He adds: "I now have a book contract with a publishing company to edit a series of high school books on forensic science."

Resources for teachers

Court TV's Rosenberg says 22,000 science teachers, including 1,200 in New York, have registered and downloaded its Web site's free forensic science curriculum.

The five-unit "Forensics in the Classroom" curriculum supplement is available at www.courttv.com.

For his high school course in Babylon, Villanueva uses materials from Science Kit & Boreal Laboratories of Tonawanda, N.Y., which cost about $75. Villanueva reads his students a synopsis of the case and lists possible suspects. In teams of two, students then pluck "evidence" from bags of hair and fiber on Villaneuva's demonstration table. They are given fingerprints to compare as well as handwriting samples to match against the alleged suicide note.

Villanueva will attend a forensic science workshop for teachers at Syracuse this summer, and next year Babylon hopes to offer forensic science courses for which students can earn college credits.

Five sections of forensic science classes already are under way at Northport. "We talk about big cases," Black says, including that of O.J. Simpson, family-killer Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald and Long Island's Robert Golub, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for the 1989 mutilation murder of his Valley Stream neighbor, Kelly Ann Tinyes, 13.

The upsurge of interest in forensic science may have unintended consequences.

"Any individual looking to commit a crime is going to realize that, 'Whoa, there are a lot of different ways that they can get me,'" Babylon's Villanueva says. "Maybe it will cause somebody to think twice."

But Northport's Black sees another possibility:

"I've had kids come in and say, 'Oh, you're going to teach me how to pull off the perfect crime,'" she says. "I'm like, 'No, I don't give up all the secrets.'"

There's one attitude, says Court TV's Rosenberg, that isn't original with him but with which he agrees: "There hasn't been a generation so interested in the field of science since the space race."

Copyright (c) 2004, Newsday, Inc.

back 2 top

# # #

Science Kit Announces Addition of Online Science Library

Ever wonder why the sky is blue, or where outer space actually is? Now you can find out with Science Kit’s Online Science Library, a collection of articles and activities geared toward educators and more curious, scientifically inclined shoppers.

(PRWEB) November 12, 2004 -- No need to polish up on your card catalog skills, and don’t worry about due dates: Science Kit has released an online version of an old stand-by. Their Online Science Library features over 50 articles and activities by teachers, doctors and scientists covering topics from snowflakes to outer space, and radioisotopes to forest fires.

In the business of science for over 50 years, Science Kit has continually strived to provide high quality products and service to its customers. The opening of the Online Science Library marks Science Kit’s latest effort to provide first-rate service to educators. With budgets being slashed, it is often difficult for educators to find high quality sources of information and activities to keep classroom curriculum fresh. The Science Library provides both of these; add the convenience of the web, and you’ve got a surefire hit. Even if you’re not an educator, you can appreciate the articles found in the Library. Articles are written in a way that can be understood by everyone, whether you’re interest in science is just developing, or you were glued to your TV set when the Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon.

The Online Science Library is an ongoing project: more articles and activities are being added all the time, so be sure to visit often. To access the Online Science Library, go to Online Science Library

Since the Online Science Library is an ongoing effort, Science Kit is always looking for new writers. Articles should be about 250-500 words in length and can cover any topic that relates to science. Articles that tie into the Science Kit product line or discuss one or more of Science Kit’s products are welcome. Writers are compensated based on article length and content.

To learn more, or to query with an idea and writing sample(s), please contact our webmaster by clicking here: OnSciLib"

back 2 top

# # #

K-12 Science Supply Leader Science Kit Aligns Teacher Developed Product Line to National Science Education Standards

Science Kit, a leading supplier of K-12 science education equipment, recently completed an initiative that aligned their products with the National Science Education Standards, easing the burden on teachers to select products that will fulfill curriculum requirements.

(PRWEB) November 9, 2004 -- Science Kit, a leading supplier of K-12 science education equipment, recently completed an initiative that aligned their products with the National Science Education Standards, easing the burden on teachers to select products that will fulfill curriculum requirements.

A tool to generate a list of Standards-acceptable products, broken down by grade level and concept, can be found on ScienceKit.com Standards.

The National Science Education Standards are the result of efforts by, among others, The National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment, The National Science Education Standards Development Team and the National Research Council.

According to developers, standards are meant to “provide criteria to judge progress toward a national vision of learning and teaching science in a system that promotes excellence”. The National Science Education Standards mark an effort to bring cohesion among localities and states in evaluating not only students, but staff, development opportunities and assessment, as well.

National Science Education Standards encompass all scientific disciplines, including Physical, Life, Earth, Space and Inquiry Based Science, as well as Science in Personal and Social Perspectives and the History and Nature of Science. Standards apply to all grade levels, from Kindergarten through Grade 12.

In an endeavor to help teachers implement these requirements in the classroom, a team of experts from Science Kit aligned their Teacher Developed, Classroom Tested product line to each concept required by the Standards. Because the Teacher Developed line is proprietary to Science Kit, the team has an in depth knowledge of the products, and were able to align the same kit(s) with many of the Standards. This brings an added benefit for teachers – not only do they know exactly what products to choose to satisfy a particular Standard, but they can often use the same kit to fulfill multiple standards, stretching their budget dollars further.

To use Science Kit’s National Science Education Standards tool, go to Standards

To see Science Kit’s complete Teacher Developed Classroom Tested product line, go to TDCT

back 2 top

# # #

Science Kit Adds Over 1,000 New Products

Science Kit, a leading supplier of educational science materials to K-12 Schools, Colleges, and Universities recently added over 1,000 new and exciting products to its website.

(PRWEB) October 31, 2004 -- This week, Science Kit added over 1,000 new products to its already extensive product line. Science Kit is a leading supplier of educational science materials to K-12 Educational Institutions, Colleges, and Universities. New products were added across all scientific disciplines, including life, earth and physical sciences, ecology and environmental science, forensic science, scientific inquiry and instructional technology. Over 25 products were added to Science Kit's Teacher Developed, Classroom Tested section, a line of products developed by real teachers in real classrooms.

To emphasize the importance of technology in the classroom, Science Kit also established two new product lines that allow teachers to introduce advanced technology to students while, at the same time, reinforcing important scientific concepts.

Quantum Tutors, available for both Chemistry and Mathematics, use Artificial Intelligence to allow teachers to enter any problem they want students to work on. As students work through the problem sets, they can enter their own work. The tutors interpret the work and provide coaching feedback based on each students unique response. For more information, visit Quantum Tutors

The PASPORT by PASCO line allows teachers to integrate the latest in probewear technology into Middle and High School curricula. The PASPORT line is engineered to provide the most accurate and reliable data. The PASPORT line of probes includes four different interfacing options, with over 60 data sensors that cover all major scientific disciplines. For more information, visit Pasco

Visit http://sciencekit.com/default.asp?sid=prweb1np often for new products, web specials not available offline, and more.

back 2 top

# # #