Duke Splash

Alice is one of our Changemakers who ran the CAP Southeast Youth Food Activist Summit. However, she is involved in more than one project, check out her latest!

 

GLOBAL CHANGEMAKERS BLOG – DUKE SPLASH – by Alice Yen

Alice Yen is a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar at Duke University.

Duke Splash is an innovative educational outreach program where high school students had the opportunity to take short creative classes taught by Duke undergraduates. The program exposed high school students to topics they may not be able to access through a traditional high school curriculum.

 

Duke students were invited to teach anything, offering classes on everything from astrophysics to archaeology, urban planning to Shakespearean sonnets, molecular biology to tap dancing. Local high school students were invited to come and learn anything, where they could choose what they wanted to learn from a huge selection of different classes, including genome sequencing, music theory, and investigations in body language.

 

On February 20, 2010, Duke University held its first Splash, working with the Benjamin N. Duke Scholars to coordinate a six-hour program with 50-minute courses running throughout the day. Before lunch, team-building competitions ranging from an engineering oriented project to a code-breaking puzzle were also spearheaded. The program was free of charge for all of the students with lunch provided.

 

Over 120 Durham and Triangle-area students attended Duke’s Spring 2010 Splash, coming from various high schools, including Hillside New Tech, Jordan High School, Durham School of the Arts, North Carolina School of Science and Math, Riverside, etc. The response from the Durham community was overwhelmingly positive, as Durham high school students expressed appreciation for being able to see people only a few years older than they were teaching their passions.

 

Alice