Workshop Inspires Kids with Hands-On Science

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS 5) ― From marimbas to magnets, students explore hands-on at the Mission Science Center in San Francisco.

Today, director Dan Sudran teaches fourth graders about electricity.

"We made a circuit putting a battery with a screw and the foil and it gets it to heat up," explains fourth grader Heavenleigh Ponce.

Dan started the center by accident in 1991, while working as a City College electronics technician.

"I was fixing oscilloscopes and meters," Dan remembers. "I got interested in the course of my fixing how these things work."

He turned his Mission District garage into a personal science lab... and left the door open.

"I'm sort of teaching myself science in a certain way that was fun, that it never was in school, and kids started coming into my garage, wanting to know what I was doing."

His garage became the backbone for a science center that supplements classroom learning. Five months later, City College offered a room and Dan started the Mission Science Center.

After thirteen years, it moved to Mission High School in 2004. Dan gives special workshops to kindergarten through high school students at twenty neighboring schools in low-income areas. That's three thousand curious kids a year!

Dan says, "If you've got curiosity and you're willing to slow down and observe and think about things, there are some really fantastic rewards."

It costs $240,000 dollars to run the program. Dan wins money from the city and grants from foundations, and the exhibits come from all over: on the day the fourth graders are doing their work, a retired chemist drops by to donate geiger counters for lessons on radiation.

Dan has amassed quite a collection of skeletons and bones. Some he's found himself. Others came from other people, including a mummified cat from a San Francisco school, and an ostrich from a San Diego butcher.

More than a dozen similar workshops have arisen around the state -- and nation -- modeled after the

Mission Science Center. Teachers use the workshop to reinforce classroom lessons, from snakes to sound waves.

Fourth grade teacher Noah Weaker says, "I can draw things, I can bring out models, and we can go through the concepts, but it still remains a mystique until they come here."

The workshop melted fourth grader Jessica Hernandez's distaste for science.

"Oh, I love science. It's really fun!" she says.

Dan understands. As a kid, he didn't like science, either.

"If I'd had this, I might've gotten into science before I was 40," he says with a wry smile.

So for inspiring thousands of children to explore and love science, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Dan Sudran.

By Sharon Chin

Related Link:

* Mission Science Workshop

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