MANSFIELD — Dawn Kitchen whisked around the classroom in a lab coat, encouraging small groups of high school students to continue stirring as she squirted hand sanitizer into plastic cups of water and wheat germ.
“What we’re going to do today combines biology and anthropology, it’s called forensics,” said Kitchen, a professor and associate dean of anthropology at the Ohio State University Mansfield campus.
Kitchen was one of several presenters during OSU-M’s Spooky STEAM Day on Friday. The event introduced local high schoolers to on-campus opportunities in science, technology, engineering, art and math.
Around 180 high school students visited the campus, including teens from Lexington, Ontario, Fredericktown, Orville, Monroeville and Pioneer Career and Technology Center.
“It’s a great opportunity for the students to get exposed to what’s available to them right here locally,” said Jessica Webb, an engineering and manufacturing teacher at Fredericktown High School. “It’s a nice introduction to the college life.”
Some schools, like Fredericktown, sent students who are already enrolled in a STEM program.
Meg Mergel, a career development specialist at Pioneer, said the event is so popular that students were chosen via a lottery system.
Sessions focused on topics like robotics, biology, chemistry, psychology and criminology, often with hands-on applications.
Kitchen led students in an experiment designed to model DNA testing. Down the hall, another group built mini launchers to see who could hurl a Buckeye the farthest.
In another lab, Professor Amber Rader guided students as they operated Fanuc robots to pick up small foam pumpkins and drop them in a basket.
“A lot of students are afraid at first to operate a robot, but after they see their peers doing it, and after they move it a few times, they gain confidence, and then they get excited about it,” said Rader, who teaches courses in automation, robotics and engineering.
Several presenters incorporated a mysterious or spooky theme into their presentations, from fact-checking reports of an extraterrestrial invasion to exploring the psychology of hypnosis and optical illusions.
“Today, you’re not students. Today you are an investigative team and you’ve got 20 minutes to figure out what happened,” English Professor Joan Richmond told her first group of students.
Richmond presented a group of Fredericktown students with a social media post claiming law enforcement covered up a possible UFO sighting.
Then she handed them a packet of related reports, including a blog post from a self-described expert, a news article, an eyewitness account and the results from a reverse image search. She asked the students to evaluate the credibility of each source and use their combined observations to determine the truth of the claim.
Richmond said lateral reading — which involves fact-checking one source of information against accounts — is a recurring theme in her course on writing and information literacy.
“It’s a way to teach them how to research productively. They have so much information out there,” she said. “Finding information is not their problem. Evaluating evidence, deciding what to do with it — that’s what they need to learn, and that’s what we teach in first year writing.”
Kelly Leonhardt, a career coach at Ontario High School, said the event can help expose students to career paths they didn’t know existed.
“I think a lot of students in high school, they tend to go into career pathways that maybe they’re familiar with or they hear about through their family,” she said. “This gives them more options.”
While some students begin their college career locally before transferring to the main campus, there are twelve bachelor’s degree programs that can be completed entirely on the Mansfield campus.
They include biology, criminology, psychology and engineering technology — a major that’s exclusive to OSU’s regional campuses.
“A lot of people don’t know about the opportunities at OSU Mansfield,” Rader said. “We have more advanced controls coursework than anywhere else in the state of Ohio.”
The campus also offers free tuition for low to middle-income students through Ohio State’s Regional Campus Commitment Program.
“If their adjusted family gross income is less than $100,000 and they complete the FAFSA by February 1st, they can basically go to school for free,” said Jessica Sturgill, director of enrollment at Ohio State’s Mansfield and Newark campuses.
“Fifty-one percent of our freshman class qualified for free tuition and fees last year.”
