Local science center has global reach

RVC organization to host international sustainability competition

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By traveling a few back roads toward Rockville Centre’s Tanglewood Preserve, wanderers may stumble upon a temporary respite from the often-busy Peninsula Boulevard. Once discovered, the Center for Science Teaching and Learning appears to be only a quaint escape for local residents.

Looks can be deceiving.

“It’s a blessing and a problem,” Dr. Ray Ann Havasy, director of CSTL, said of the center’s appearance. “When people look at us physically, they think of us as a nature center. We’re a global science education organization.”

The center will host the 2017 Spellman High Voltage Electronics Clean Tech Competition next month, a contest CSTL has made global since taking it over from a California corporation six years ago. The 10 finalists — eight student teams from the United States and two international teams — will present their projects focused on green and sustainability solutions while vying for a $10,000 prize at Stony Brook University on July 14.

With help from the center, the winner is connected with a scientist or engineer to help make a prototype into a reality, and the U.S. Patent Office then aids the students in protecting their innovation and taking it to the next level.

“For us, it’s not about winning prizes.,” Havasy said. “It’s about creating something that will do the world good. ...Science is about discovery and then sharing your discovery, so that’s what we really try to encourage them to do.”

The contest — which received entries from 742 students representing 330 teams and 26 countries — features teams from Minnesota, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, Maine, Singapore, the Philippines and a lone representative from Long Island: Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School.

Mary Lou O’Donnell, Plainview JFK’s research coordinator, helped lead 10th-graders Audrey Shine and Alyssa Iryama in their research of feeding graphene, a carbon compound, to silk worms. The girls then twined the cocoons made by the worms into threads, which were found to be stronger than those made by silk worms that were not fed the substance.

The project won the engineering category at the Nassau County Science Competition earlier this month, and garnered first place at the New York Institute of Technology Connect-To-Tech fair earlier this spring.

For the Clean Tech Competition, the team is now exploring whether it can use the cocoons to filter water, which O’Donnell said could be used in developing countries.

“We feel honored to represent Long Island because we are well aware of the quality of the projects here,” O’Donnell said. “…At this point, we feel as though we’ve exhausted all the resources at our school, but we know that there’s so much more to do, and they’re ready to do it.”

The solar-powered Rockville Centre nonprofit also helps administer the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon — to take place in Denver in October — which challenges collegiate teams to design, build and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient and attractive.

Havasy, a scientist from Port Washington, founded the CSTL in 2000 as a resource for teachers and families, in an effort to focus more on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — which she said was not being valued enough. She added that the country is at a “tipping point,” and that the center strives to make all kinds of sciences — including physics, chemistry and biology — fun and relevant to visitors each year.

“If we don’t do something [to show that STEM] is a really cool, exciting thing to do, we’re going to begin to really see economically the effects of that,” Havasy said.

Staff members — as well as summer volunteers, many of whom are Rockville Centre high-schoolers — lead explorers through trails past a pond, a honeybee yard and plenty of greenery. The center’s Nature’s Kids Nursery School, which Havasy touted as the only science-based nursery school of its kind in the state, introduces children to science early on.

Youngsters who came to explore the preserve waited on line outside a large white house — where the center cares for various injured wildlife — for a bathroom break. In one of the structure’s main rooms, a parrot greeted guests while a screech owl offered a high-pitched call and turtles swam around their tank.

Outside the back door, two goats jumped up on the wooden railing playfully, as a peacock showed off its beauty in a separate pen. Nearby, owls rested away from the sunlight.

Across from the nocturnal creatures, a life-like dinosaur stood in front of an empty brown building, which Havasy said would house CSTL’s newest attraction: the WAC Lighting Hall of Science. The geothermal-powered hall, which she said she hopes to open next spring, will house a dinosaur exhibit with 40 different specimens from the movie “Jurassic Park,” as well as bones, robotic dinosaurs and other interactive depictions of the latest in dinosaur research.

By now, Havasy, who presents professional development and science education workshops around the world, is used to people’s interpretations of the organization only as a fun field trip spot, or a nice place for a nature walk.

“We’re a cute center that does cute things,” she said with a smile. “And global things.”