Exploring chemistry’s role in everyday life requires a lot of glass vials, beakers, and pipettes. Here students use extracts from red cabbage to learn about acids and bases. (photo: Brian Faircloth)
It was a busy summer at NCSSM for Summer Accelerator, which gives rising seventh- through 12th-grade students an intensive NCSSM educational experience. While the school has run a number of grant-based summer programs for students from throughout North Carolina for nearly its entire history, Summer Accelerator – along with its younger grades equivalent called Early Accelerator – is the school’s only tuition-based program, and it is open to any student from anywhere in the world who is interested in participating.
This was Makizel Jackson’s first summer in the program. Though the rising senior from Carolina Friends School in Durham will be too old to participate in future Accelerator programming, he made the most of the opportunity this summer by participating in two courses, the most recent of which was Biomimicry: Biology by Design. Makizel and his classmates studied the adaptive behaviors of biological models, then considered how humans could replicate those behaviors to solve similar, real-world challenges such as making combustible materials more fire-resistant, or transporting water during a drought for agricultural purposes.
“It’s been so much fun,” Makizel says. “I didn’t think I would like biology before I came here, but since I’ve been here and have been in the class, it’s truly been an amazing experience for me. I’ve grown to love biology.”
Now in its 11th year, NCSSM’s Summer Accelerator program offers one- to three-week-long academic summer camp experiences. When Accelerator first launched in 2014, eight STEM enrichment courses were offered to just over 100 students. This summer, the program offered 27 high school courses to more than 350 students through NCSSM’s Durham and Morganton campuses as well as online.
Neo Gregory, a rising sophomore from Perquimans High School in Hertford, is a Summer Accelerator veteran. This marked the third summer she participated in Accelerator programming, with this most recent course – Chemistry of the World: Exploring Everyday Chemical Reactions – being the fourth Accelerator class she has taken. Students in the course spent the majority of their time in white lab coats, conducting hands-on investigations of how chemical reactions form the basis of so many everyday products and activities in our lives.
“The instruction was really, really good, and the way everything was organized really gave me a fresh perspective,” Neo says. “The program is helping me go further, and giving me more foundation to what I know. It’s introducing me to new concepts. Every time I come here, I learn something new and get a new skill.”
As exciting as the instruction is, the opportunity to be in a shared space with like-minded students is one of the most rewarding parts of the program, Makizel says.
“The environment of the classroom is just so much better than a standard class where you sign up for the grade. People sign up for this, and they paid for this, because they want to be here, they want to learn.”
“It really brings in a lot of different people from different communities who are academically motivated,” Neo adds. “There’s always something here for everybody.”
