Nine high schools from surrounding areas will send their students, mostly juniors, to see the demonstrations in Science and Robinson Halls on March 26, according to Dr. Greg Caputo, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

Professors representing the biological sciences, chemistry, biochemistry, computer science, mathematics and the physics and astronomy departments will conduct the demonstrations at the event. Rowan students will participate as aids and logistical support.

Dr. Gerald Hough, an associate professor of psychology, said that the Rowan students are an important part of the program because they serve as campus guides.

“[Rowan students] enjoy talking with the students, since they are only a few years removed from themselves being high school students,” Hough said.

Caputo and Hough are co-chairs of Rowan Sciences Day, and share responsibility for planning, scheduling and organizing the day’s events. They organize the event each year along side Dr. Fatma Ilicasu and Dr. Marlena Herman of the mathematics department, who organized the initial event in 2007.

“[We] prepare and make invitations to schools [by communicating with] the principals and the math and science coordinators,” Ilicasu said.

The target student group size for each demonstration is 24 students per lab setting, with a goal of 100 to 120 attendees in total.

“We place students in their favorite three choices so they can attend those and see what excellent experience Rowan math and science classes have to offer,” Ilicasu said.

Each department is represented by professors who volunteer their time and effort to make presentations of their own personal preference. The demonstrations exhibited include a “gold” plating of pennies by the chemistry department and a DNA extraction from fruits by the biology department.

“Chemistry and biochemistry will also be doing demos on colors in food, colors of atoms and polymer science,” Caputo said. “The math department will be presenting several different topics including ‘Fractals to Infinity and Beyond’ and ‘How Math is Used in the Environment.’”

Besides the demonstrations, the event will consist of two separate hour-long presentation periods and a final presentation period with a break in between for lunch provided by Rowan’s Marketplace in the Student Center.

The program will start with a presentation at the Edelman Planetarium in Science Hall after the students receive a name tag and a program. Attending students can even go home with a goody bag packed with information about the university and its departments, as well as a key chain or pen.

The math and science professors hope to expose high school students to “working with cutting-edge labs and instruments that they don’t have exposure to on a [high school] level and widen options for future careers through applied science demonstrations,” Caputo said.

The demonstrations have sparked an interest in the departments that are hosting the event.

“We have had at least 15 students who attended a previous Sciences Day come to Rowan as students,” Hough said. “While we cannot be positive that Sciences Day was the deciding factor, we have had excellent questions and supportive feedback from students during the sessions.”

This years Sciences Day will be held from 8 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. In the future, the math and science departments hope to host a Rowan Sciences Day for middle school students.

“We wanted to start a day of science with the purpose of planning activities for high school students, from grades 9 through 12, to peak their interests in the sciences and to motivate them to pursue further studies in the sciences, hopefully at Rowan University,” Ilicasu said.

The department of astronomy and physics got the inspiration for the event because 2009 marked the International Year of Astronomy. Assistant physics and astronomy professor Jim Canna was assigned the event and its programming.

“We hope to make it an annual event. This year we decided to talk about the sun, but we hope each year will be on something different,” Canna said.

Saturday’s event, scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. in the Edelman Planetarium, is set to bring in people and make them aware of our planet and its surroundings.

“Many students have come forward to ask questions on the event,” said associate physics and astronomy professor Eddie Guerra.

The event is free and open to the public, not just Rowan students. If weather permits, there will be a daytime observation of the sun and Venus from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. If not, there will be a showing of the IMAX movie, “Solarmax” in the planetarium.

“One way or the other it’ll be a fun day of events,” Canna said.

There will also be many different activities, from being able to view the sun with a hydro alpha (H-alpha) telescope weather permitting to introduction speeches on the sun and our solar system by faculty members Dr. Steve Simmerman, Planetarium Director Keith Johnson and physics and astronomy professor Lloyd Black.

The event will kick off with an introduction to the planetarium, followed by Simmerman’s lecture on solar eclipses and Black’s lecture on solar activity and sun spots.

“The sun is the closest star to Earth and is 150 million kilometers away, or if at the speed of light, the Sun is 8-1/3 light minutes away,” Black said. “In comparison, the next closest star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years/2,207,520 light minutes or about 266,000 times farther from Earth than our sun. without our sun, life would not exist, so some understanding about our solar system’s star would be useful.”

This school year thus far has been a busy one for the science and engineering departments. They have sponsored many public shows and plan to do so the rest of 2010.

“It’s exciting. We are talking about viewing things not many people know about or see,” Canna said.

The next event hosted by the department of astronomy and physics is a spring equinox lecture called “Finding Half the Starlight in the Universe: Adventures with the BLAST Experiment,” set to take place on March 25. The lecture will begin at at 7 p.m. in the Rowan Auditorium in the Engineering Building.

Randall, who is an adjunct professor of the physics and astronomy departments, says the best way for students to learn all about physics, regardless of major, is through making it more applicable to themselves.

“One of the things about physics is that people think of the way physics used to be taught,” Randall said. “We don’t do that anymore. We use what is called conceptual physics. We teach the concept, then once we’ve got the concept taught, then we introduce the mathematics, so that students understand what the terminology is and what it deals with.”

Indeed, conceptual physics helps students become better acquainted with the practical study of this particular science. According to Randall, getting people to redefine the terminology, along with seeing students understand and react to it, makes it more exciting.

Randall also says that the idea of this new concept will help students along in an elementary school setting, of which most of his students, Education and Mathematics majors, plan to be. Kevin Jonathan, a senior physical science major, intends to use the concept in his career after graduation.

“It really helps you to learn physics from a non-mathematical view,” Jonathan said. “I like how he uses different applications. I’ll definitely be using them when I teach.”

Rachael Rhodes, a freshman math and science and elementary education major, suggested that Randall’s course is a great choice to fulfill a general education requirement.

“I would recommend the class to students who are non-science majors, and to students who are looking for general education science course for their major,” Rhodes said.

Before Rowan, Randall was a geophysicist for several years, but he is not new to the teaching game. He has been teaching here at Rowan since 2001, and doesn’t plan to slow down. He said he loves his job, and the best thing about it is the students.

“I just thoroughly enjoy working with the science majors and the non-science majors, and to see them grasping the idea of physics, and everything that we’re dealing with,” Randall said.