The David and Lucille Packard Foundation is now featuring the Greenfield CSW as a grantee success story.  Here is their description of the process of transforming the old City Hall in Greenfield, CA, into a thriving and vibrant community resource for hands-on science education:

How do you turn an old City Hall building into a lively and energetic science workshop for kids and families?

“Basically, you need two things, tables and electrical outlets,” said José Sanchez, the Coordinator of Greenfield Community Science Workshop (Greenfield CSW).

With these two necessities, José and his team got to work in 2011 transforming the previous Greenfield City Hall building into a Community Science Workshop. The current City Hall is down the street, and the old building was sitting unused – a perfect opportunity. The team brushed fresh silver paint on the floors of the former City Council Chambers, laid out a collection of bones and rocks, set up a microscope, an oscilloscope, some wood, tools, and nails, and quickly a safe learning space for the community began to emerge. Since then, José and his team have continued to create an engaging space for students to investigate and experiment. Their goal was to offer a “safe and peaceful place that stimulated and inspired the minds of Greenfield students,” said José.

The workshop is within walking distance from two elementary schools, one middle school, one high school, and hundreds of students’ homes. The central location of Greenfield CSW is fitting, as the community support of this workshop has been impressively strong. “Despite the politics, everyone in Greenfield, residents and elected officials alike, understand the importance of investing in our youth through creation of an environment that nurtures their curiosity and creativity,” said José.

With the City Council, the local library, local schools, and parents behind them, the Greenfield CSW has hit the ground running and has opened up youth’s eyes to the possibilities of science while giving them a place to hang out and connect after school. Greenfield CSW serves as both a field trip destination and a drop-in program for youth, ensuring the opportunities they provide are accessible to all students. The CSW is also beginning to offer after-school programs at local middle schools.

The Packard Foundation sees organizations like the Greenfield CSW as vital to our communities. By offering enriching science education to families and a fun and secure place for students to go after school, Greenfield CSW greatly advances the learning opportunity and experience for Greenfield youth.

The Greenfield CSW is one part of a larger CSW Network which has six workshops in Northern California. “As part of the CSW Network, we believe that every town needs and could benefit from a Science Workshop,” said José. If Greenfield’s rapid success and constant community support is any indication, we imagine most towns would be thrilled to have a CSW move into the neighborhood.

Here’s the link to the Packard story on their website.

We’re tooting our own horn, so to speak!

On March 13th, 2013, the Excelsior Community Science Workshop held a Grand Opening in their new space at 35 San Juan Ave. in San Francisco.  The newest site in the CSW Network has taken over the old auditorium of the Ocean Avenue Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Ocean and Mission St. in the Excelsior district.  An outgrowth of the Mission Science Workshop, Excelsior CSW will be run by MSW staff member Sol McKinney (a former student of the first Science Workshop).  Families and kids from the neighborhood turned out in force for the opening night party, where they had a chance to explore the many hands-on exhibits built by staff members.  Participants also got to build projects at several hands-on making stations, where staff explained how to make glovaphones, penny helicopters, and flying toys for the wind tunnel.  Thanks to our friends from the Exploratorium’s XTech program for coming out with gooey gak for all!

The space is half taken up by exhibits such as the wind tunnel, the Van de Graaff generator, the tube telephone, a light table, microscopes and specimens, a giant adjustable circuit board, an array of oscilloscopes hooked up to sound generators, drums, bubbles, live animals, bones, rocks, and fossils.  The other half of the space has been built out as a workshop, where students can make, tinker, and build the science projects of their imaginations.

San Francisco City Supervisor John Avalos cut the ‘ribbon’ for our Grand Opening, and has come out as a strong advocate for the Excelsior Science Workshop as a community resource in science education for the Excelsior district… Thanks for all your support John!

For more pictures of families and kids enjoying the workshop, please see the full album on our Gallery page.

On February 18th, 2013, staff members from seven Community Science Workshop sites and affiliate sites in California got together for a training hosted by the CSW Network at the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop.  Designed to highlight the rich store of expertise and teaching skills embodied in CSW staff members, the training was planned around small table-based discussions that presented findings back to the larger group.  Our Network Coordinator facilitated debates and brainstorms on three main topics:  Science Vocabulary and Science Discussions, Materials, and Working with Different Age Groups.

Staff members from the Mission Science Workshop, the Excelsior Science Workshop, the Oakland Discovery Centers, the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop, the Greenfield Community Science Workshop, and Fresno Community Science – as well as educators from affiliate sites the San Jose Community Science Workshop/MESA program, and the Science, Art and Music Academy in Fresno – contributed to an in-depth examination of how our programs operate, and what our shared values are.  In the segment on science vocabulary most sites agreed that the best time to start a science discussion with students is after they’ve had a chance to build something and/or to mess around with materials.  Individual educators shared favorite examples of teaching science without relying on technical vocabulary, such as describing an electrical circuit as a highway for energy, and referring to the buoyant force as the ‘thingy’ force.  Each small group presented the science behind a particular science workshop project: the structural lessons in a wooden table, the chemistry of gak made out of borax solution and glue, and anatomy through bone puzzles.

The materials topic got everyone fired up, because Science Workshop educators take their junk seriously.  Staff members from different cities shared tips on where to find donated nine volt batteries, where to get free 2 x 4′s, and new designs for making water cannons out of recycled pvc irrigation pipes.  A heated debate on the value of using dumpster dived and recycled materials versus new, commercially produced components brought out an impressive list of pros and cons on both sides, and the question of environmental sustainability inspired new strategies for reducing the impact of our programs on local landfills.

Community Science Workshops serve kids and adults of all ages, through drop-in as well as school-based programs, so staff members had a lot of combined and varied experience to share about working with different age groups.  The conversation focused on how to engage students at different developmental levels, and especially those who may think they’re too old, or too young, for science workshop.  From there we shifted into an overall discussion of how to grab and maintain interest, and how to deal with rowdy, disruptive, or unsafe behavior.  It was inspiring to hear the thoughtful and compassionate strategies brought forward by individual staff members, for working with kids in difficult situations.  The entire group demonstrated an overall commitment to the principles of positive discipline and of progressive education that affirmed our shared values and forged strong bonds of camaraderie amongst employees of the seven participating organizations.

What better way to end the day than by building yo-yo’s?  After all that talking, the last hour of the day was spent in a flurry of activity as CSW staff members designed new yo-yo and top projects.

See more pictures in our photo album on the Gallery page.

Youth Workshops Explore Science

By Chris Sanchez, originally published 2/14/13 in El Tecolote newspaper

Reprinted here with permission.

The first time 10-year-old Sol McKinney set foot inside the Mission Science Workshop, he wired together two six-volt batteries to make a heater and was instantly hooked on science.

McKinney was one of the first students of the Mission Science Workshop—a nonprofit organization that partners with local schools to offer K-12 students in the Mission District a hands on, experiential approach to science that is often absent in classrooms.

Now a graduate of U.C. Davis with a degree in ecology, McKinney returned to the organization as a teacher and manages the workshop’s newest branch in the Excelsior District.

“It was probably one of the reasons why I decided to get a degree in the science field,” McKinney said. “[The Mission Science Workshop] honestly gave me a space to start exploring my own creativity.”

The half-Irish half-Mexican resident of Diamond Heights grew up in the Mission, which he said allows him to have a closer bond with students living in his former neighborhood.

“The amount of connections that I’m making with them is great, showing them that they can come from the exact same place that I came from, and go as far as I have,” Mckinney said.

Mckinney also said some students are often not allowed to play with or touch certain things at home—the Excelsior Science Workshop is a place where these limitations that stifle learning are lifted.

“One of the things I always say with my classes is that this is a safe place to guess and be wrong,” he said.

“We’re really focused on helping you figure things out.”

Mission Science Workshop teacher Aaron Joe Martin calls on one of Margaret Kwok’s Moscone Elementary School students to answer a question about gases. Photo Chris Sanchez

The Excelsior branch is part of an effort to expand into other areas with immigrant populations who often learn English as a second language and don’t have the same educational opportunities as others.

“We want to give our time to the kids whose families have to work three or four jobs, and have six kids to take care of and don’t have the resources to take them to the Academy of Sciences all the time,” Mckinney said.

Through grants, donations and help from volunteers, the workshop offers after-school programs and invites students to visit on field trips for lessons that supplement what they are learning in the classroom.

The organization originally started in 1991 inside founder and Executive Director Dan Sudran’s Mission District garage, where the former City College of San Francisco electronics technician would practice his hobby of tinkering. His garage quickly became an outlet for curious neighborhood Latino children to explore their creativity through some of their own experiments.

Recognizing the demand for a space where children could explore science, Sudran approached CCSF with the idea to create the Mission Science Workshop at its Mission campus.

“On a general level science is the search for truth,” Sudran said. “That’s where I see the big failure with our educational system; it’s not giving the learners a real help in the search for truth that science is.”

The Mission Science Workshop has since moved to Mission High School’s old auto shop. The workshop’s shelves are cluttered with contraptions made by former students such as homemade speakers and handmade wooden scooters—it is a veritable mad scientist’s laboratory.

On Thursday morning, Junipero Serra Elementary School teacher Pat Koblenz brought her second-grade class on a field trip to the Mission Science Workshop for the first time.

“As a teacher we have so many things we have to do and with the state focus on testing, it’s sometimes a struggle to get the science and social studies in because there’s such a focus on math and language,” Koblenz said.

Teachers at the workshop offer bilingual classes to accommodate students who are learning English. Their curriculum stresses an observational approach to learning, which often asks students to describe what they see when conducting experiments. It is this style of teaching that they say helps students internalize concepts better than the usual memorization and regurgitation of material.

“Some kids will say, ‘Wow. I always thought science was so boring’ and that’s kind of sad to hear because you realize that the rest of their experience with science was either really difficult or disengaging for whatever reason,” said Sam Haynor, a teacher at the workshop.

In addition to an opportunity to learn about science, Sudran said his workshop can provide an alternative life path for children who live in underserved neighborhoods like the Excelsior.

“You can show [children] that science is a beautiful way to satisfy the need for excitement and the need for being appreciated and cared for, but in way that you want to embrace the whole world, because you see how we are not separate from it or from other people,” Sudran said. “I think if everyone saw that, this would be a very different world.”

The Mission Science Workshop is located at 3750 18th St. inside Mission High School. The Excelsior Science Workshop is located at 35 San Juan Ave. To find out more contact (415) 621-1240 or visit their website at www.missionscienceworkshop.org.

By Michelle “Binka” Hlubinka
Originally Posted March 13th, 2013 on MAKE magazine’s blog, reprinted here with permission.

Here’s a fun new take on 3D visualization and design: Make Your Own Gopher!

Months ago, my colleagues and I were brainstorming the curricular connections we could make between making and high school coursework. Anatomy could be a rich area of overlap: students could laser cut slices of skulls and print mini skeleton models to have the kids explore skeletal structures, for example.

Dan Sudran, the executive director of Mission Science Workshop, was way ahead of us. I discovered this when he pulled out a bin of carefully sorted, actual gopher bones for construction and re-construction. Pelvises, front, legs, back legs, tails, skulls: each had its own cup full of tiny gopher parts, 60 sets in all. Dan and his teaching colleagues at this and other Community Science Workshop sites use these to get students to “make your own gopher”.

Dan, the founder, created this making activity with few resources. Gardener friends who trap gophers gave him the carcasses, and he just puts them outside to be cleaned off by Mother Nature over weeks and months. Then he sorted them and turned  those hapless gophers into a fun biology lesson.

Dan did the same thing with a 30-foot juvenile gray whale skeleton that washed up on a central Californian beach near Pescadero. He throws those 150 bones or so into the back of his truck, drives them to different schools, and  stages a “Whale Week” during which every class in the school gets a chance to puzzle the skeleton together. They discover the vestigial remnants of the whale’s pelvis, grown puny over millions of years of evolution.

I visited Dan in his organization’s new Excelsior location of the community science workshop while on tour with my Young Makers colleagues yesterday as we visited other inspiring locations likeBrightworks and Noisebridge. As I was coming in, Dan and his colleague Emilyn were moving a large, heavy chunk of fossilized sea floor (pictured left) that Dan had found on BLM land in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He spends his vacations looking for more objects that can spur more kinds of learning in his kids.

Excelsior Science Workshop is opening tonight from 6-8 pm at 35 San Juan Avenue in San Francisco (near the corner of Mission Street & Ocean Avenue.) Tonight, stations will be set up (including some exhibits that look just like ones we’ve seen at the Exploratorium, like the ever popular bubble table, right.) Come tinker, create and explore. Excelsior Science Workshop will request donations on a sliding-scale of $10-20 to help develop future science education programming.

Excelsior Science Workshop is a makerspace. It has tools and wood and lots of junk to hack and tinker. It was such a lively space, I didn’t notice until the end of our visit that there wasn’t a single computer in the whole room, and the only screens were that of the two oscilloscopes on the electronics bench. I was also impressed that they require no parental involvement, not even a permission slip, to come and use the space.

The vision behind Mission Science Workshop, Excelsior Science Workshop, and the growing network of community science workshops is to lower the barriers between kids and science as much as possible. What if kid-friendly, hands-on, science-rich workshop spaces were as ubiquitous as public libraries? What if kids could walk in anytime they wanted to work at a drill press, examine a specimen at the microscope table, or tinker with electronics? What if a mini science museum lived right around corner from where they went to school, and they could visit every day without hopping on a bus or a subway for an hour (and then be turned away at the doors of a beloved museum because they came without mom and dad?) Dan, Sol, and Emilyn are making this happen in sites across California.

Dan started Mission Science Workshop in 1991 in his garage to bring a hands-on laboratory / science museum experience  into his own neighborhood, the Mission District of San Francisco, which then, back before a few rounds of tech gentrification, was much more full of low-income and historically underserved youth. Dan’s original workshop moved to the former auto shop of Mission High School, where it still serves kids as young as kindergarten. The new Excelsior location will be run by an alum of the MSW program, Sol McKinney, who we saw teaching a class  to a roomful of engaged and excited second graders as we arrived.

Dan told me he wants to encourage people “to do their own thing, not by doing big initiatives, but just in cubbyholes here and there.” Mission Science Workshop has succeeded not because they knew where they were going as they began. “There’s no road,”  Dan emphasized. He’s learning by doing, just as the kids who come to his space are learning every day alongside him. “The learning is in the fussing.”

Here’s a great article about the new space tacked to their bulletin board, in both English and Spanish.

http://eltecolote.org/content/2013/02/youth-workshops-explore-science/

And please go drop in on them tonight, Wednesday, March 13 if you are in the neighborhood, and/or any day in their bright, gopher-bone-ful future!
Excelsior Science Workshop
35 San Juan Ave, San Francisco, 94112

Two last projects we loved during our visit to Excelsior Science Workshop yesterday:

A 20-foot wave demo (right), built with duct tape, dowels, and balls, also prototyped, we are told, with skewers and gummies.

A playground telephone (below) built of two red and two blue funnels and about 80 feet of reclaimed irrigation tubing, and duct tape around the necks of the funnels. I’ve been wanting to add these to my kids’ play set for years! This is such a simple, clever design.

Erik Herman, Education and Outreach Coordinator at Xraise, uses hands-on, construction-based CSW projects as the basis for after-school programs with kids, at Saturday and evening family events, during summer camps at the eXploration station, and as a supplement to tours of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education. Over 3500 science projects have been built at these events since fall of 2011. In addition to these ongoing events, Xraise has used CSW projects during several teacher trainings for science and math teachers in New York.

The CSW projects and activities that are inspiring all this making and tinkering are drawn from two books written by Curt Gabrielson, founder of the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop: Stomp Rockets and Kinetic Contraptions.  The books contain step-by-step instructions, materials lists, and science concept elaborations for a series of projects that are easy to build and fun to learn from.  Stomp Rockets emphasizes using everyday materials that are readily available around the home, and Kinetic Contraptions expands on this theme to include projects with simple circuits using small hobby motors.  Both books are available for sale on the website for the Chicago Review Press:  Stomp Rockets here and Kinetic Contraptions here.

“There has been such an explosion of interest” says Herman, that “we are going to offer teacher workshops specifically geared toward the content of the books to a total of 32 teachers this year.”   These workshops will take place in the fall and spring of the 2012-2013 school year, and Xraise plans to give a classroom set of motors and batteries, as well as both of Gabrielson’s books, to each participant.   Teachers will have the opportunity to build several of the projects, learning first-hand how to work with battery packs, propellers, wheels, and eccentric weights, among other ingredients for successful tinkering.

On July 2nd, 2012, the CSW Network held an all-staff training day at Mission Science Workshop (MSW) in the former auto shop at Mission High School in San Francisco.  Staff members and teachers from all five Community Science Workshops in California came together to learn about other CSW programs, and to take new science projects and activities back to their individual locations. The day-long event offered staff members the opportunity to have fun together, forming new contacts, rekindling old friendships, and opening avenues for increased networking and communication between sites.  One of the primary goals of the CSW Network is to facilitate this kind of contact, making it possible for staff members to dream up and coordinate projects with staff from other sites across the state.  Attendees ranged from MSW’s three middle school-aged student interns, to high school and college student employees, to the complete adult staff of all sites and all Site Directors.

The training focused on exploring science questions experimentally - through building electrical circuits; investigating atmospheric phenomena by playing with air and water; and demonstrating newly developed activities from each site. Experiments with electricity included building simple series and parallel circuits with buzzers, motors, and lights, as well as observing the differences between direct and alternating current using an oscilloscope and voltmeters.  Hands-on activities with air and water pressure included investigating everyday tasks and phenomena, such as drinking liquid using a straw, using syringes to take up and compress air, and filling and inverting vessels of different dimensions.   Participants even got to make ‘flash’ pickled cucumbers in a syringe, by displacing water with vinegar using negative pressure.

Participants left happy and tired to take new ideas back to their respective sites, where concepts and projects introduced at the training will help staff members to ignite enthusiasm for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in the youth they serve.  Kudos to the team and all the teachers and volunteers who participated in staff training day in July!

Click on photo to view album

Text and photos reprinted with permission from KQED.

A Happy, Noisy Mess: Community Science Workshops Take Root in California

Audio Report on Apr 20, 2012 by Amy Standen from QUEST Northern California

Kids growing up in the Bay Area have access to more than a dozen science museums and zoos but in much of the state, those opportunities don’t exist. With science programs getting trimmed in schools, that leaves many kids with little access to hands-on science. One Bay Area man wants to change that.

Dan Sudran grew up a good Jewish kid in Kansas City, Missouri. He went to college then law school. But he says there was always a sinking feeling that he wasn’t really cut out for the world he’d been born into. “I couldn’t really figure out what I was or what I wanted to be. I didn’t go to college because I wanted to. I went because that’s what you were supposed to do,” says Sudran.

Discovering Science

It wasn’t until his late 30s that Sudran finally had his revelation. It happened in a garage. He had started taking apart electronics, collecting bones from the beach. In school, science had held no interest for him. But in the real, hands-on world he says, it turned out to be the thing he’d been missing all along, “My life is immeasurably better since I got into science.”

And this gave Sudran an idea. What if he could give kids the same experience he’d waited 30 years to discover? A local college donated some space and soon a small, non-profit organization called Community Science Workshop Network was born. Sudran says the idea was to be the opposite of a big science museum, “It’s your own dream garage, in a sense, just a bunch of stuff you can play around with without being nervous that the curator’s gonna have a nervous breakdown. There are no curators.”

Community Science Workshops Take Off

Today, there are five community science workshops around the state, funded by private grants. One is in Greenfield, about 30 miles south of Salinas. It’s a farm town – lettuce, broccoli, apricots – mostly Spanish speaking. It’s one room, in the back of the former Greenfield City Hall. Every inch is crammed with stuff: Bones, microscopes, power tools, a turtle, a snake. And above all, there’s noise. A lot of noise. As kid’s bang away, Jose, a middle schooler, builds a submersible robot. “It’s the submarine type of thing. It runs on little engine things that would spin,” says Jose.

As someone strums a guitar, an 11-year old named Eduardo scoops tadpoles out of a bucket of pond water to look at them under a microscope. “We have to take it out of the water, he explains.” Meanwhile, spread out on the floor, some older kids trim the outlines of a future hot air balloon and another kid plays the ever appealing, though not terribly scientific, Casio keyboard.

Running this place costs about $50,000, paid for by a grant from Bechtel and the Packard Foundation. But Sudran says grants can be sort of a mixed blessing. For instance, not long ago he came across a stranded gray whale on a beach near his house in Pescadero. “It was lifted up by the tide high on the beach. And it was completely recoverable. And there was no loss. I couldn’t believe it, says Sudran.

Sudran has a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service to collect specimens and he thought the skeleton would make a good teaching tool. Although it would have been nice to get some funding, Sudran says there was no time for something like that. “You say these bones are gonna be lost. I can’t let that happen. I’m not gonna waste time writing a grant. That takes months.”

Sudran got some volunteers to pull up the bones, then brought them to his backyard and spent months cleaning them off. Now he brings the entire skeleton to schools where kids can put it together. “There ain’t no budget. No time for a budget, we just gotta go do it.”

The dream, Sudran says, is to take this model all over the state, “So many places, I could reel them off. Oxnard, Bakersfield, el Central. We don’t want to make our place any bigger. We want more of them.” The small southern California desert town of Coachella is in the works, so is Vallejo, and Sudran hopes soon to open a center in Daly City.

The week of March 12th, 2012, was Whale Week at John Muir Elementary in San Francisco.  The Mission Science Workshop worked closely with teachers at the school to design a week-long curriculum built around using the complete skeleton of the gray whale excavated by the CSW Network in August as a teaching tool.  All classes at the school had time to handle the whale bones during the course of the week, and every classroom activity used the whale as a subject of inquiry and inspiration.  Students measured the bones to calculate ratios, wrote whale poems, did whale dances to learn gray whale behavior, and drew the bones as an exercise in observation, proportion, and as an introduction to anatomy.

The week-long experiment in integrating CSW hands-on exhibits into an entire school was a huge success, garnering enthusiasm and praise from students, teachers, and parents at John Muir.  The San Francisco Chronicle (read here, and see full photo gallery of the event) and San Francisco Examiner (read here)  published articles on the collaboration.  Dan Sudran, Director of the Mission Science Workshop, has appointments for Whale Weeks at two additional SF schools eager to experience the whale.  In future, the whale will also travel to other CSW sites in the Network, as a traveling science exhibit made possible by collaboration between CSW sites.

Click image to view photo album

Anayeli Rubio and Aniceto Gonzalez use a commercial drill press to work on their project at Watsonville’s Environmental Science Program an after-school ‘clubhouse’ where kids have access to tools and materials to work on their hobbies and make projects. The program recently won a $73,000 grant to expand. (Dan Coyro/Sentinel)

Freedom to explore: Children, families learn, forge connections at Watsonville workshop

By DONNA JONES – Santa Cruz Sentinel

Posted: 01/26/2012 06:02:58 PM PST

Watsonville kids find a whole new world when they step into the… (Dan Coyro/Sentinel)

WATSONVILLE – Hammers pound. Drills buzz. Children chatter.

It’s a typical day at the city’s Environmental Science Workshop at Marinovich Park. In one corner a mother helps her daughter build a new home for the family cat. Two groups of middle school students are designing hovercrafts on nearby tables. A small girl climbs up on a stool to reach into a cage and pet a guinea pig.

For more than a decade, the free drop-in program has provided an opportunity for children to explore their interests and families to connect over projects. A new $73,000 grant will help keep it going and spread the concept to other communities.

“At the most basic level, it’s a safe place where kids can go and be involved in constructive activities,” said program coordinator Curt Gabrielson. “But once they’re here, there’s huge content. They’re always surrounded by big concepts and phenomena.”

Program coordinator Curt Gabrielson gives advice to Ali Espindola and Maggie Medrona, who are building a hover craft at the Environmental Science Program lab in Marinovich Park. (Dan Coyro/Sentinel)

Gabrielson founded the workshop at Marinovich in 1997. Today, with funding through a variety of grants and the Public Works and Utility Department’s Environmental Education Program, there are two more workshops, and a van that takes the program to low-income apartment complexes. The city also has partnered with Pajaro Valley Unified School District to provide after-school science classes at 10 elementary schools and six middle schools.

Then there’s the Community Science Workshop Network, a collaborative of five programs in which Watsonville plays a leading role.

The network, which awarded Watsonville the $73,000 grant, is funded by the Bechtel Foundation and the Moore Foundation.

Gabrielson’s assistant, Emilyn Green, is chair of the network’s board, which also includes representatives from San Francisco, Oakland and Fresno.

Gabrielson, who has written two books documenting workshop projects, is serving as a mentor the network’s newest member, a fledgling program in Greenfield.

Wednesday, he talked over the hubbub of the busy workshop at Marinovich. His office consists of a computer tucked into a small niche of the room. The rest of the workshop is crammed with salvaged materials, such as scrap lumber, used in projects. Geometric sculptures made from straws hang from the ceiling. Bones and fossils rest on tables ready for touching. A frog swims in a tank.

“It could be a free-for-all, but it’s not,” Gabrielson said. “You have to choose to be here so they focus on working on a project of their choice.”

Nayeli Estrada, 10, comes every week with mom Blanca Calderon. Among the projects the pair’s completed is the wooden scooter Nayeli rode to the workshop Wednesday.

“With two little ones at home, this is our time together,” Calderon said.

Watsonville High School senior Stephanie Chavez, 18, said she started coming to the workshop when she was 8. Now, when she has a project for school, she heads right over.

Wednesday, Chavez and partner Noradeli Villanueva, 17, were building a rocket from a plastic soda bottle and cardboard for physics class.

Chavez plans to enroll in a pre-veterinary program at Fresno State next year, and said the workshop sparked her interest in science. She’d come in and see what other kids were working on, and decide she wanted to learn how to do it to, she said.

“When I’m old, I’m always going to remember this place,” Chavez said.

Watsonville kids find a whole new world when they step into the Environmental Science Program workshop. (Dan Coyro/Sentinel)