Explore Adventures is a nonprofit organization helping West Virginia elementary school children.
Photo By U.S. Chamber Foundation
Approximately nine thousand Mercer county students have benefited from a recently founded science program, Explore Adventures in Science and Civics.
Explore offers science and civics experience to young students, primarily those in grades three to five. It offers its services to elementary schools, scouts, and home school organizations throughout southern West Virginia, but is open to any child wishing to participate. According to the program’s Facebook page, it utilizes a hands-on, inquiry-based methodology to help students “assess complex issues, design solutions, correlate crosscutting concepts and core ideas through dynamic inquiry.” The goals of Explore revolve around fostering curiosity, promoting teamwork, and developing critical thinking skills.
The program was founded by Magistrate Mike Flanigan and his wife, Special Prosecutor for Crimes against Children Holly Flanigan, several years ago after they contacted a local school to offer their help with the science fair. Upon learning that no science fair existed, they made it their mission to promote science education in the community. This started with organizing a science fair for Mercer Elementary. From there, they went on to host seven more fairs over the next few years until the School Board declared it mandatory for all schools to hold annual fairs.
These endeavors led the couple to create afterschool science clubs for the students to foster their interests and education at both Mercer and Straley Elementary Schools, which successfully recruited around sixty to seventy kids.
Up to this point, the Flanigans had been charitably funding the events almost completely out of their own pockets. They would use materials such as old Pringles cans to design activities to teach the students various concepts and ideas that they could see and hold in their hands – making, as Mike Flanigan puts it, “science with garbage.” Eventually, Explore became an officially recognized nonprofit organization funded through grants and tax-deductible contributions.
Since this success, the program has taken up a number of projects, such as hosting science camps and hosting eighteen to twenty different special events. It has also gained a permanent location on Mercer Street in Princeton, a website, and a Facebook page.
Concord University students have assisted Explore in the past, namely the Chemistry Department, the Computer Science Club, and the Geology club. The Geology Club volunteered a 3D sandbox that digitally mapped the landscape of the sand within the box and predicted the effects of weather and other factors on the sculpted landscape.
While the program’s primary focus is scientific inquiry, it also provides students with dynamic practice in the area of civics, a subject closer to the professional fields of its founders. Interactive activities such as Constitution Tic-Tac-Toe and Three Branches Jeopardy guide students’ familiarity with the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the three branches of government, and the judicial process. Most notably, the students can participate in mock trials, in which they play out scripted roles in an actual court room.
Director Holly Flanigan has developed over three hundred different labs, which involve everything from making fossils to building miniature robots and even processing crime scenes. The facility on Mercer Street includes many interesting models and devices. For example, a structure referred to as Pipe Dream mounts one wall and serves as an entertaining, interactive model for physics. The pipes attach to a metal wall via magnets and can be arranged in an endless number of ways; a golf ball is dropped into it and allowed to pass through whatever configuration of pipes is assembled.
The program is still fairly young, but so far it has benefited an estimated nine thousand children in Mercer County.
Mike Flanigan emphasizes the importance of fostering children’s interests in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, since these subjects prevail in everyday life and play a fundamental part in almost every faucet of life. “If we get even one child to do something with science or learn something, the activity will be worthwhile.”
If interested in volunteering, you can reach the program’s Facebook page, Explore Science Adventures, for further information.