Hands-on Lab Outreach Program

The Hands-onLab (HOL) is Chico’s outreach program offering inquiry-based science and math activities to K-8 students throughout the region. The HOL programs continue to be a successful recruitment tool to attract math, science, and liberal studies majors into the field of teaching, most notably those previously focused on elementary school. The HOL experience has already been replicated successfully by several of our CSU sister campuses. Students working with the hands-on experiences use the hours as part of their required early field experiences for their credentials and had used the experience as a course toward degree. In order to maintain the experience for recruitment and retention of math and science educators, there is discussion for an expansion of general field trip experiences, outside the course, working more directly with our CA Subject Matter Projects in STEM and recruiting engineering students to work with our math and science students to create NGSS and CCC-M activities.