Barbara Bunn and Gary Long receive Alumni Award for Outreach Excellence
Virginia Tech's Barbara B. Bunn, of Bristol, Tenn., assistant professor of chemistry, and Gary L. Long, of Blacksburg, associate professor of chemistry, received the university’s 2004 team Alumni Award for Outreach Excellence.
The award recognizes a team of employees that has developed and implemented an outstanding, focused, and coherent outreach program within the community at large, the state, and/or the nation. The Commission on Outreach designates the members of the selection committee.
Bunn conceived, designed, supervised construction, and ensured implementation for the first-of-its-kind Mobile Chemistry Laboratory (MCL) outreach program in the United States, a program that operated for eight semesters from fall 2000 to spring 2004. The MCL delivered a work area for 24 students and contained high-tech chemistry instrumentation and computers. The laboratory reached from far Southwest Virginia to inner-city Richmond five days per week and included one school that "didn’t even have a beaker," Bunn said. As its traveling teacher, Bunn formed close ties between Virginia Tech and many high-school chemistry teachers by enhancing teacher preparation and expertise in chemistry and taking the high-technology classroom to more than 18,000 students, renewing their sense of excitement for science.
Long became director of the MCL, developing ties to industry leaders and increasing learning and job opportunities for students using the MCL. He created the ChemKit program through which non-instrument-intensive, low-tech chemical experiments are sent out to teachers to support areas of the Standards of Learning (SOLs). Long also started advanced workshops for chemistry teachers and attempted to include graduate students in the project as often as possible.
Through the MCL, more than 60 high school teachers received training in five basic workshops since 2001. The MCL was responsible for 32,464 student-conducted experiments in 138 schools for more than four years. In addition, 11,448 ChemKit student-conducted experiments were conducted at 66 schools. The success of the MCL can be measured in part by the gains in SOL scores during its years of operation. On average, participating schools realized a cumulative gain of 37.2 points, compared to a state average gain of 20.7 points. Most of all, however, Bunn and Long have served as "ambassadors" of Virginia Tech to Virginia’s schools. One teacher called the MCL "the best project I’ve ever seen that really makes a significant impact on what and how well students learn chemistry."
The College of Science at Virginia Tech gives students a comprehensive foundation in the scientific method. Outstanding faculty members teach courses and conduct research in biology, chemistry, economics, geosciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, and statistics. The college is dedicated to fostering a research intensive environment and offers programs in nano-scale and biological sciences, information theory and science, and supports research centers—in areas such as biomedical and public health sciences, and critical technology and applied science—that encompass other colleges at the university. The College of Science also houses programs in pre-medicine and scientific law.
Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become among the largest universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech’s eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.
