Ahmaogak, an Iñupiaq Eskimo home-to-school coordinator, grins as she watches giggling groups of children try to close their hands around a hologram of a pig. "We like it when science comes to the village," she says, "because a lot of us can't take the long plane rides to get to the science."

Perched on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Wainwright is a whaling and trapping village. It's home to 493 Iñupiat Eskimos, 150 of them preschool through 12th-grade students at Alak, the village's only school. The science festival that drew them out in that February blizzard is part of an HHMI-supported outreach program of The Imaginarium, a science museum in Anchorage that takes hands-on science to remote villages all over the nation's largest state. Since 1992, HHMI has awarded $700,000 in grants to The Imaginarium. The museum uses HHMI support to develop the hands-on science activities that The Imaginarium brings to more than 300 native villages. Corporations such as ConocoPhillips, the largest oil producer on the North Slope, or the schools themselves, foot the substantial bill for delivering the programs to the villages.

ON THE "ROAD" AGAIN
When they take their science show "on the road," Imaginarium outreach workers Ramon Wallace and Amy von Diest don't travel light. They stuff into six 50-gallon Rubbermaid crates nearly 800 pounds of things that fly, float, light up, fall down and spin around; an additional, large black container holds their sound equipment; and of course there's the indispensable complement of parkas, snow boots and sleeping bags. "On the road" is actually a bit of a misnomer, though, because there are no roads to most of their destinations.

On this North Slope trip, for example, Wallace, von Diest and their ample cargo fly Alaska Airlines to Barrow—a town of 4,500 and the northernmost point in the United States. From Barrow, it's bush planes to Wainwright, Atqasuk, Point Lay, Nuiqsut and Kaktovik for two weeks of double-digit below-zero weather outdoors and lively science classes, assemblies and community science festivals indoors.

For people of all ages in the remote Alaskan villages, it's as if the circus has come to town. Word spreads rapidly, and excitement runs high. As one little boy told his mother, "the imaginary people are coming." Whole villages turn out for their science festival, with the adults as rapt as the children.

The Imaginarium offers outreach programs on reptiles, insects, electricity, chemistry and flight. The North Slope schools have chosen flight. It's a science subject central to everyday life in villages that rely on planes for their bread, milk and toilet paper; for the citizens band radios that keep them in touch with their neighbors; for the snow machines that have replaced dog sleds as everyday transportation; and for mail, emergency medical care and basketball games with teams from other villages.

In Atqasuk, an inland village of 228 where caribou paw through the ice-encrusted snow to graze, black-haired children ages 5 to 18 stampede up the bleachers of the Meade River School gym for an all-school assembly on "Flights of Fantasy."

"What flies?" asks von Diest, tossing Wilbur, a rubber chicken, into the air. Not Wilbur—as the fowl prop nosedives to the floor, giggling children shriek their answers: "Planes! Rockets! Ravens!" Von Diest has their attention. "Why can they fly?" she continues. Enlisting students to toss Frisbees, hurl gliders and launch a hot-air balloon, she explains and demonstrates the four forces of flight: weight, lift, drag and thrust.

After the assembly, von Diest shows kindergarten through second-grade children how to make balloon-powered "rockets." A soft buzz fills the classroom as pairs of students help each other send their rockets toward the ceiling. The squabbling and competition that often accompany such projects in primary-grade classrooms elsewhere is conspicuously absent. "Together we have an awesome power to accomplish things," says a poster extolling cooperation, one of a series illustrating Iñupiat cultural values that lines the corridors of the school.

A couple of fifth graders are coaching von Diest in Iñupiaq, now taught as a second language to school children of North Slope villages in an effort to preserve the culture of a people who, a generation ago, were sent away to residential schools and forbidden to speak their native tongue. "Aaka," Stacey says, pointing to a gray-haired woman seated at a school-cafeteria lunch table reserved for village elders. "Grandmother." Von Diest gives it a try: "Anak." The girls collapse in 11-year-old hysterics. "That's the word for poop," gasps one.

FLYING EGGS
Third through sixth graders are exploring air and gravity with Wallace, making parachutes out of squares cut from large plastic bags, string, orange sticky dots and washers wired together to simulate the weight of a person. Wallace's parachute carries a more fragile payload: a raw egg in a bubble-wrap flight suit. He drops the 'chute, and the egg hits the floor. "He's hurt," shouts a fifth grader, pointing to cracks spreading across the eggshell. "He has a concussion," Wallace agrees, checking the egg for leaks. Nothing is seeping through the cracks. "At least it wasn't fatal."

"While they're having fun making and dropping parachutes, they're learning that air is a real thing with mass, a thing that reacts in predictable ways to pressure and motion, acceleration and free fall," Wallace explains. He gazes around the classroom at some of the parachutes floating gracefully and others hurtling toward the floor, at David repositioning the strings on his 'chute to give it more lift and Josie removing a washer to help her pilot lose weight. "I get so much energy from doing this," says Wallace, "especially when one of the kids ‘gets it.' You can see that lightbulb come on in their eyes. There is nothing more exciting."

The high school students are a harder sell. A class called "Wacky Wings" is designed to teach 7th through 12th graders the Bernoulli principle, which says that the faster air moves, the lower the pressure it creates, and Newton's third law of motion—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. "Anybody play baseball?" Wallace asks. Silence. "Anybody a baseball fan?" More silence. The teenagers of the frozen tundra, where ball games of necessity are indoor sports, are not relating to the aerodynamics of a curve ball that makes the air move faster as it spins.

Wallace hands out "puddle jumpers," rigid sticks topped with angled plastic blades. The teens try spinning them clockwise, which propels them straight to the floor, and counterclockwise, which shoots them upward. "What do you feel on your hands?" he asks. He waits a beat or two, then answers himself: "Air, right?" The high school students are busy shooting puddle jumpers at each other. "What's the air doing?" says Wallace. "It's pushing down. And what happens when you push air down?" He looks expectantly around the classroom. No one replies. "Come on, work with me, people. You get lift, right?"

MOTIVATING STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
In Atqasuk, four seniors are due to graduate this year. There are no juniors. "We have several sophomores, but who knows how many will be back next year," says a secondary-grades teacher at Meade River School. "Most of the kids here drop out when they hit 16." Like most of the teachers and all of the principals in the North Slope schools, this teacher is not an Alaska native, but a transplant from the part of the United States that Alaskans call "the lower 48." If he follows the trend, he'll move on in another year or two.

Most students can't see much reason to stay in school. Home to Prudhoe Bay and the trans-Alaskan oil pipeline, the North Slope Borough School District is the richest in Alaska. Oil company leases and royalties have brought running water and sewer systems to the Eskimo villages across the North Slope, and they have built and equipped school facilities that stack up against virtually any of their lower-48 counterparts.

Every permanent resident of Alaska receives an annual payment from the oil income, the statewide Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. The Alaska natives also get income from the native corporations that run the Eskimo villages. It's enough to put a color TV in almost every house and a satellite dish outside to bring in 100 channels. Medical care is free. But there is no industry in Atqasuk, Wainwright or the other Eskimo villages. Unless they work for the school or in village maintenance, the people live on subsistence hunting, trapping, whaling and fishing, as their ancestors have for centuries. Ilisagvik College in Barrow offers associate degrees and vocational certificates, but moving to Barrow—accessible from Atqasuk or Wainwright only by bush plane—takes enormous determination, motivation and just plain guts.

When Marjorie Angashuk's son Wilbur turned 18, he said to his mother, "What am I going to do with my life?" She blinked at him, uncomprehending. "Get a trap, like your father," she said. Stanley Afcan, 24, dropped out before finishing high school, and, although he has taken a couple of distance-learning courses, he doesn't have the grades or credits to seek a college degree. Besides, his girlfriend grew up in Atqasuk and has no interest in leaving her family. "I always liked science," Afcan says wistfully as he watches the village children and their parents experimenting with magnets and microscopes at the science festival. "I was good at science. I was the one who asked all the questions in science class. Now I just wish I could find a job."

Greg Danner, outreach program manager at The Imaginarium, and his colleagues hope the museum's programs will reach and help motivate young people like Stanley to stay in school and perhaps even pursue careers in science. Science teachers say that the programs are increasing student interest in labs and experiments. English teachers report that vocabulary introduced during the traveling science programs crops up in student compositions for months afterward.

"However, rarely does one experience of 45 minutes or even 45 hours make a lifelong positive change that may be counter to the student's environment, upbringing or personal goals," Danner points out. "We will need to make sustained contact with these students over years. Even then, the ones who are in elementary school now are those whom we are most likely to affect. We may need to recognize that simply improving older students' attitudes toward science is a worthwhile goal."

Meanwhile, The Imaginarium is working with the Native Educators Association and the Alaska Federation of Natives to help bring more regional science training to village teachers and teachers' aides and to inspire more Alaska natives to become teachers and return to village schools. In 2004, the museum's outreach staff of five will take the helm of a network of rural science fairs that focus on linking traditional native and modern Western science.

They are well aware that they can't solve a complex educational, cultural and economic problem by themselves. For now, "our main mission is getting kids excited about science," says Mia Jackson, The Imaginarium's director of programs and exhibits. "We're bringing the science circus to town."

» Visit The Imaginarium Web site at www.imaginarium.org. See a thumbnail profile of The Imaginarium's HHMI-supported program at www.hhmi.org/news/071001b.html.

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Photos: Jennifer Boeth Donovan and Tim MacDonald

Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
June 2003, pages 14-17.
©2003 Howard Hughes Medical Institute