UToledo Graduate Students Make Astrophysics Impossible to Ignore

UToledo Graduate Students Make Astrophysics Impossible to Ignore

At The University of Toledo's first-ever Pumpkin Fling last October, students launched 120 small pumpkins with giant slingshots across a campus field. They earned candy for accurate aim at a giant cornhole board and sledgehammered pumpkins for midterm stress relief.

By the time the last gourd met its end, physics and astronomy graduate students Abigail Ambrose and Jacob Beavon knew they were building something special.

Just one year before, Beavon and Ambrose decided to revitalize the Department of Physics & Astronomy's outreach program, which had been dormant since the pandemic shut it down in 2020. "After such a long hiatus, revitalizing the program ended up looking a lot more like starting it from scratch," Ambrose said.

Their original plan was modest: take physics and astronomy demonstrations into local schools. First, they inventoried what the department had on hand including a gravity well, an angular momentum stool and a trove of liquid nitrogen activities. Confident they had enough to begin, they reached out to local schools.

Five schools said yes. That first spring, the pair and their fellow volunteer graduate students visited individual classrooms and full-school assemblies, reaching students from 4th through 12th grade. Every single school asked them to come back.

Since then, word spread fast. This academic year, 30 schools requested visits - six times as many as the year before. Combined with community and campus events, like the pumpkin fling, the program logged 40 outreach events in just its second year of renewed operation.

Knowing the Audience

The growth, Beavon and Ambrose believe, owes much to a philosophy of meeting audiences where they are. With elementary school students, the emphasis is on movement, hands-on participation and connecting science to things kids already know.

The gravity well-a vast expanse of stretchy black fabric-allows students to warp their own 'spacetime' by swirling marbles around a heavy exercise-ball star. The angular momentum stool invites kids to spin while holding weights and feel, in their own arms, why an ice skater speeds up when she pulls hers in.

"When we are in an elementary school, we try to anchor the science in real-world experiences: the pull of gravity after a jump, the way ice skaters control their spin, and even the reality of binary stars like those Luke Skywalker sees on Tatooine," Beavon said. "At this age, if we can simply get students excited about science for an hour, we have done our job."

With older students, the conversations go deeper. High schoolers want to know what a physicist actually does on a Tuesday afternoon, what career paths the field opens and what graduate school is really like.

The grad students also fulfill teacher requests to tailor presentations to topics recently covered in class, an accommodation they credit in part for the program's perfect return-invitation record.

The Wilder, the Better

If knowing the audience is the program's foundation, boldness is its signature. The UToledo team has brought a bowling ball pendulum to within inches of their noses to demonstrate energy conservation. They have repeatedly shocked themselves with a Van de Graaff generator and passed the charge down a chain of high school students. They have poured liquid nitrogen onto their bare palms - safely, by exploiting the Leidenfrost effect, in which a thin layer of rapidly evaporating nitrogen gas briefly insulates the skin.

Liquid nitrogen is arguably the program's most versatile tool. In a single school visit it might yield exploding film canisters, a racquetball shattered like glass after 60 seconds of submersion, frozen flowers crushed to powder, and - invariably a crowd favorite - freshly made ice cream served to the audience.

"Scientists are often perceived as people who conduct crazy experiments, build weird contraptions, and occasionally blow things up," Beavon said. "We have found that leaning into that is a benefit, not a detriment."

Teaching and Learning by Doing

The program runs entirely on volunteer power - and every volunteer joined because they genuinely want to share science. Audiences feel the difference.

Somewhere in the cycle of demos, conversations and follow-up visits, the grad students who set out to teach fourth graders about orbital mechanics discover they've also learned something about communicating what they love and why it matters.

That enthusiasm carried them to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting earlier this year, where Dr. Tom Rice, AAS director of education programs, invited them to write for the national AAS Education Blog.

"The efforts put in by Abigail and Jacob are tremendous and they deserve recognition," said Dr. Nikolas Podraza, NEG endowed chair professor and chair of physics and astronomy. "It's incredibly important to continue to spark interest in STEM at all ages as kids grow up to learn and love it."

As the program has grown, these volunteers don't just teach a room of fourth graders about physics, they rediscover why they fell in love with it in the first place.