About
Reach Into Research is a curriculum development organization based in Boston, MA that creates high school science lessons, projects and videos, available free for public use.
How We Design Our Lessons
For every topic in science, there is an application or recent discovery that is awe-inspiring. We focus our lessons around these amazing examples. We start the lesson with a jaw-dropping experiment or question that students are curious about and then set out to explain what is happening using videos and activities. Our videos teach challenging content while being laugh-out-loud funny. This pedagogy converts a mundane traditional curriculum into a story that students are eager to participate in.
In-class projects involve experiments, computational modeling and data analysis based on cutting-edge scientific research. These projects allow students to experience what it is like to do research in various STEM fields, motivating them to become scientists/engineers and showing them the types of research they could pursue. Their participation in research projects is also the best way to learn the scientific method. It is critical that students understand how scientific discoveries are made so that they believe scientific findings and know how to determine whether something is true. We also feel it is important for lessons to be useful for students’ daily lives. We tie in health and environmental protection. We are creating citizen science projects for students to carry out that can positively impact our communities.
We make our lesson interdisciplinary, unlike traditional courses that treat physics, biology and chemistry as unconnected. Some of the most exciting research is at the interface of different disciplines, and questions that students are curious about often span multiple subjects. To make our lessons successful, we provide background information so that students can understand the concepts even without having taken all core science courses.
Gabe Bronk, PhD
Executive Director and Curriculum Developer
Vivekanand Pandey Vimal, PhD
Curriculum Developer
Funding
The National Science Foundation has provided initial funding as part of the I-Corps program at Brandeis University. We are currently looking for new funding sources and very much appreciate donations (click the Donate button on the right).
Gabe Bronk holds a Ph.D. in physics and B.S. in biochemistry, both from Brandeis University. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. He has designed and taught classes at the high school level (for homeschoolers) and college level (at Brandeis), including project-based courses funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His breadth of scientific knowledge and experience working in both experimental and computational research allows him to effectively communicate in-depth scientific concepts and the research process. Gabe hopes that your students will wholeheartedly enjoy Reach Into Research’s lessons and will laugh at Gabe’s jokes sometimes.
Vivekanand Pandey Vimal taught physics, environmental science and chemistry at Waltham High School in Waltham, MA for 6 years and worked on education projects for an NGO India. He received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University and a B.S in Physics from Boston University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab at Brandeis. He founded and directed a summer program where high school students were paired with mentors and spent 6 weeks conducting STEM research projects in labs, and currently he is co-developing and co-teaching a course called "Introduction to Research" at Waltham High School. You can learn more about him on his webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/vivekanandpandeyvimal
