Science an Odyssey for area middle-school students

By Barney Breen-Portnoy

Published: June 1, 2008

Several dozen rising sixth- and seventh-grade students in Charlottesville and Albemarle County this summer will explore science through the Odyssey 2025 program.

The program is the product of a collaboration of the city, the county, the Public Education Fund of Charlottesville-Albemarle and the JASON Project — a nonprofit subsidiary of the National Geographic Society that promotes science education by developing curriculum units for middle-level grades and professional development for teachers.

Odyssey 2025, which starts on June 9 and ends June 26, will offer two separate tracks — one on meteorology and the other on ecology. Participating students will meet four times per week for three hours in the morning at the Charlottesville-Albemarle Technical Education Center.

“The goal of Odyssey 2025 is two-pronged — to provide students with an engaging and fun summer experience and to get teachers to learn a new curriculum and to teach inquiry- and project-based lessons,” said Jessica Kalagher, the science instructional coordinator for the city school division.

The “Monster Storms” meteorology track and “Resilient Planet” ecology track are based on curriculum units designed by the JASON Project. The plan is to incorporate those units next year into both the city and county middle school science curricula.

Students in the “Monster Storm” track will get to visit local television studios to learn about weather forecasting and stand in front of the green screens used to display the weather graphics. As part of the “Resilient Planet” track, students will visit local bodies of water such as Meadow Creek and the Rivanna River, as well as the Chesapeake Bay.

“These are hands-on programs in which students are going to be able to behave like real scientists,” said Chuck Pace, the county’s science instructional coordinator.

Twelve teachers have signed on to participate. The teachers will be expected to go back and work with their colleagues on what they learned during the program.

School officials hope that Odyssey 2025 will help teachers develop system-wide best practices in math and science.

The Public Education Fund of Charlottesville-Albemarle has raised about $70,000 to fund the Odyssey 2025 initiative.

Students do not have to pay to participate in Odyssey 2025. Kalagher said that she and Pace have been working with principals and teachers to select a diverse group of students.

“We want a broad range of students and not just high-achieving students with engaged parents,” Kalagher said.