URMC start-up lets kids take science lessons "to go"

Dina Markowitz, Ph.D.

Susan Holt

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention.

And Science Take-Out – a URMC start-up company selling pre-packaged, portable high school science kits – was born from the clamor of New York State teachers wanting to help their students meet stringent high school Regents graduation requirements, which include passing at least one science-related exam.

“In order to be eligible to even sit for the exam, students must log a minimum of 1,200 minutes in the lab,” said Dina Markowitz, Ph.D., Science Take-Out’s president and a professor of Environmental Medicine.

Too often, Markowitz said, teachers and school administrators watch students fall short of this target, missing classroom experiments due to sickness, disability and even disciplinary reasons. In fact, nearly half of all students in Rochester's city schools are barred from taking the Regents Biology exam due to insufficient lab credit.

“While it’s relatively easy to send work home to kids who have missed English or Social Studies class, it is an entirely different proposition to ask them to duplicate a science experiment at home,” Markowitz said.

Markowitz’s passion for teaching stems from her work directing URMC’s Center for Science Education and Outreach, a program that works with secondary school students and teachers to bring modern science technology into Rochester classrooms. The CSEO not only operates the Life Science Learning Center – a pair of teaching labs located in the Medical Center that offer science classes to 2,000 area kids each year – but also runs school break and summer science camps for middle and high school students.

Markowitz said she originally designed the kits for students who didn’t have access to laboratory facilities, like home-schooled children, or students in alternative education programs. She is finding, however, that teachers order the kits for use in regular classrooms and even for enrichment programs.

“In today’s world, the need for basic scientific literacy is much greater than it was even a decade ago,” Markowitz said. “Science is real life – we live in it. But again and again, kids write it off, saying it’s something they just can’t do. But they have to, and we have to make it accessible.”

Science Take-Out is a collaborative effort, Markowitz said, thanks to the expertise of Susan Holt, a retired Biology teacher from the Buffalo area who Markowitz met nearly six years ago. No novice in creative curriculum solutions, Holt had previously been recruited to help a Long Island school district solve a similar lab-credit-crunch problem. After Holt developed a series of simple lesson plans that the school’s science teachers could assemble themselves (using easily accessible store-bought items), 75 of the students at risk for ineligibility were able to qualify for the biology Regents.

“When Susan suggested we offer a product more widely, I jumped at the chance,” Markowitz said.

In November, Science Take-Out commercially debuted its “to-go” labs at the Science Teachers Association of New York State’s annual convention. Today, the company is a bustling homegrown operation in the truest sense: kits are splayed all over Markowitz’s house, claiming her night and weekends. Still, she is hopeful as she angles for a National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, which sponsors the development of drugs, medical devices, and a handful of educational initiatives. If that award pans out, it could be the catalyst Science Take-Out needs to leap to the next stage in its evolution.

So far, Markowitz and Holt have assembled nine distinct, plastic-bag science kits. One allows students to explore how environment and heredity drives the Darwinian theory of natural selection, asking them to follow the genetic code of the fictional “beebop” species. Another kit lets students model the process of genetic coding for proteins, using pipe cleaners and beads.

Every kit meets that state’s science education standards, and detailed descriptions of each are available online at www.sciencetakeout.com. Markowitz has already sold hundreds to educators in more than a dozen states, and even Saskatchewan, Canada.

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