Johana Cruz Lopez from de Gaspar de Portola Middle School presents her project while President Harrison looks on. Photo by Lee Choo

A standing-room-only crowd filled the president’s boardroom in California State University, Northridge’s University Hall on Sept. 10. The group—an assembled mix of CSUN professors and students; middle school students, parents and educators; and CSUN President Dianne F. Harrison—watched as future scientists from Gaspar de Portola and Oliver Wendell Holmes middle schools presented their award-winning experiments they hope will go into space.

The groups beat out students from other Los Angeles area schools in the China Space Science Education Project, a collaborative effort between CSUN and China’s Nanjing University of Science and Technology in which the winners’ experiments will be in the running to be conducted in a Chinese space shuttle or space station.

The first presentation came from the students from Holmes: Jasmine Campos, Katherine Guzman, Diana Sanchez, Genesis Sandoval, Nathalie Tuazon and Meghan Williams. The group presented “Jalapeño Pepper and Broccoli Seeds In Space,” in which they outlined an experiment to track the germination rate of those seeds. The second report came from Johana Cruz Lopez from de Portola, whose “Boiling Water in Space” wondered how different boiling water in space would be from doing it on Earth.

CSUN’s President Harrison will be personally pitching the ideas to the president of Nanjing University, Wang Xiaofeng, during her upcoming visit to commemorate the school’s 60th anniversary. He will decide which of the projects will go on to the final round of judging by the Chinese space administration for the grand prize: to be placed on a Chinese space ship in a future launch.

Justine Su, a professor in the Eisner College of Education and the director of The China Institute, is one of organizers of the China Space Science Education Project on CSUN’S end. The China Institute is made up of a group of about 200 faculty, staff and members of the community who are committed to enhancing U.S.-China relations.

Su said she believes the program is a great example of CSUN at its best.

“CSUN shines again in our community and beyond when we recommend these selected American middle-school students science projects,” she said. “CSUN is in a unique position as a pioneer of international collaboration in science education. We have, and will continue to, stimulate lively dialogues and exchange of ideas among science-education scholars and generate great interests in the study of sciences from young students in the U.S. and China, especially female and minority students.”

Biology professor and China Institute Science Team Director Steven Oppenheimer—who shepherded the project along with Su and China Institute Founding Director and physics and astronomy emeritus professor Paul Chow—shared Su’s optimism.

“This is a monumental collaboration between the U.S. and China,” Oppenheimer said. “It catapults CSUN into a position of leadership in international science education. The project is all about getting youngsters to begin to think [about] science. The two teachers—Terri Miller and Stacy Tanaka, whose students won this competition—are among the top science teachers in the U.S., who train their middle school students to do science research that gets published.”

China Institute, China Space Science Education Project, Featured