"Teach anything, learn anything" became the theme of Saturday afternoon as students came together to share their passions. Splash!, an event in which Brandeis students created and taught courses to high-school students, allowed participants on both sides to explore nontraditional subjects in an informal classroom setting.
This Saturday featured the first annual Brandeis Splash! event, hosted by Education for Students by Students. High school students from the area, as well as home-schooled students, were invited to the free event and chose from a schedule of 14 classes, which this year included topics such as time travel, brain and memory, duct tape art and X-Ray reading.
The goal of ESS is to create a platform where "people from the community can come in and share their knowledge and share their passions," Brendan Reardon '14 explained in an interview. He first encountered Splash! last year, when he taught his own course on screenwriting for scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Reardon, who started the program at Brandeis along with Ben Wang '15, based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model of the same event.
"The whole idea of Splash! is that the teachers are really teaching something they are passionate about ... and all the students really want to be there," Reardon explained.
Splash!, which originated at MIT 25 years ago, is a nationwide program. Although this year's enrollment was low-MIT's program usually draws about 3,000 students from around the country and the world-Reardon explained that this is typical for the first year and that enrollment is expected to grow for next year's program, which will take place in the fall.
The event was on Saturday from noon to 5 p.m. Nearly 30 students from Boston area high schools were ushered in by event volunteers wearing neon yellow shirts. After signing in, they were each given small notebooks adorned with the Brandeis logo and a name tag that read "Splash Spring Student" and were allowed to make any last-minute adjustments to the schedules that they had pre-made online. The high-school students, mostly accompanied by parents carrying Brandeis pamphlets, picked from a variety of classes that interested them. All of the classes were all located in the Mandel Quad.
Ariana Boltax '14 started at noon teaching a course she created called "How Doctors Do It: Making Diagnoses from X-Ray" based off her experience working at the New England Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Weymouth, Mass. Although only one student attended her first class, she sat enraptured and attentive as Boltax demonstrated the process of developing and reading X-Ray.
By the end of the hour, the high school student was able to read and perform a basic analysis on real X-ray taken from the animals of the New England Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.
During the second block, one of the classes, taught by Wendy Moy, '15, and Sabrina Libretti '15, encouraged six high school students to build their own tetrahedral kites. Using straws, tape, scissors, string and tissue paper, Moy and Libretti walked the students step-by-step through the construction of four pyramids into a flyable kite.
Both interested in chemistry, Moy and Libretti explained the connection between the tetrahedral shape and the make-up of molecules. The idea from the class was modeled after a project Moy did in her high-school Advanced Placement Chemistry class.
Moy, a Neuroscience and Psychology major, explained in an interview that the goal of Splash! was to allow high school students to learn from other students who are "teaching classes in a subject that they're very passionate about, something that they know is not traditionally taught in high school. We wanted to use this opportunity to foster a love of learning in the high school students."
Reardon also explained that they faced several problems with liability "because it was the first time doing it," explaining that they were unable to have classes such as cooking and self-defense.
Other feedback the program received from parents of the students included charging for the event. Reardon explained that although one parent suggested that it would "lend legitimacy to the program and make people more committed," he was more interested in making Splash! accessible for all of the Waltham community. "We talked about it, but we decided that we really wanted it to be a free program," he said.
At the end of the day, as the sun set on the Mandel Quad and an afternoon of learning, some students left Splash! holding kites and others with the new ability to analyze X-rays. The sharing of nontraditional knowledge and the facilitation of learning was a testament to the day's mantra: teach anything, learn anything.