Elizabeth Pulanco / Winonan

At Winona State University, student clubs incorporate different service activities into their schedules for the year. As a way to give back to the community and develop their teaching skills, Winona State’s chemistry club has been working with different schools around the Winona community and participating in different outreach activities with the students.

Jonathon Mauser, chemistry professor and faculty advisor for the club organizes activities and communicates with teachers from these schools. Earlier in November, the club visited Bluffview Montessori School.

“So far we have gone to Bluffview Montessori, which is K—8, and we did an experience with the seventh and eighth graders,” Mauser said. “We also have appointments at Cotter High School and Winona Middle School. It all depends on when the teachers need us for the lessons.”

The different modules the chemistry club has available for the younger students can be adapted to students in elementary, middle and high school science programs.

At Bluffview, the chemistry club worked with the seventh and eighth graders to learn about their DNA.

“The ones we did at Bluffview was an experiment with the students, using real scientific equipment like pipettes and thermal cyclers that we use to make more copies of DNA,” Mauser said. “We also used real scientific reagents that any real lab would use and we had the students find the sequence of one of their own genes.”

The gene the middle school students studied is the gene connected to an individual’s ability to taste bitter foods. Mauser explained how the ability to taste this bitter compound is correlated with someone’s enjoyment of food like broccoli and mustard. If people can taste this compound, they will not like these foods.

“We had them figure out what kind of taster they were by using test strips that have the bitter compound on them and they touched their tongue to the test strip and if they tasted it strongly, they are a taster and if they do not taste very much of the bitterness, they are not a taster,” Mauser said.

After determining if the students were “tasters,” the chemistry club had the students take cotton swabs to the inside of their cheeks and collect the DNA in their saliva. After collecting the DNA, they were looked at through a process called gel electrophoresis, which, determined the range of their tasting abilities.

When the chemistry club finished their work with the students, their professor concluded the lesson with a discussion.

According to Mauser, the other modules for the outreach activities focus on experiments related to diversity, forensic science and identifying genetically modified organisms.

“It depends on what the teacher needs, so we have five or six different modules we can put out if we need to,” Mauser said.

Members of the chemistry club include chemistry education majors, and participating in the outreach activities gives them the opportunity to work with students before they enter their field.

Mauser also sees the outreach activities as a great way to work within the community and help local teachers.

“We want to also be a resource to teachers in the community,” Mauser said. “Not only is it helping the Winona State community, it also helps the Winona community by helping improve the education of younger students and supporting the teachers who have limited budgets for running things like this.”

As the outreach activities continue, Mauser hopes to provide other services to local teachers, like demonstrations, so the teachers can have to tools to perform the experiments themselves.

“We are hoping to start a lending library of demonstrations for teachers to come in and get trained and then check out equipment to do the demonstrations,” Mauser said. “This gives teachers more flexibility and this would be housed in the chemistry department.”

Mauser hopes to continue working on the community service aspect of the club as more outreach activities are planned for spring semester.

For Mauser, the chemistry club and the outreach activities provide a new appreciation of science for the students in the club, and the students being exposed to the experiments for the first time.

“I really want to make it so my students can’t really get away from chemistry,” Mauser said. “You open your eyes and you see it all around you and it really makes the world a more beautiful place.”

-By Elizabeth Pulanco