At Salt Lake City's Uintah Elementary School, camera-rigged Lego vehicles negotiate a boulder-strewn landscape in Dallin Miller's classroom. For a day, the room simulates the surface of Mars as part of the Junior Engineering traveling technology showcase.
The "Red Rover" module is designed to demonstrate the technical challenges and science associated with planetary exploration. Students such as Hayden Kingston got a rover-eye perspective on a computer screen, allowing them to move the device with the help of classmates' verbal direction.
"I would love to have it at my house," Hayden says. "You have to learn how to drive it because you won't be able to go if you flip over."
A real rover that flipped or stalled on Mars' surface would go nowhere, an inglorious fate that now awaits Junior Engineering. Perhaps the state's busiest traveling science program, reaching up to 90,000 kids a year, Junior Engineering is a casualty of increasingly scarce educational enrichment dollars.
After 13 years, Utah State University officials plan to mothball the program's modules and equipment next week. With no state or corporate funding, the program must be self-supporting, but the past two years it has run deficits approaching $100,000, USU officials said.
Kurt Becker, chairman of USU's department of engineering and technology education, stressed the decision was not based on the university's budget challenges.
"There are tighter belts all the way around," Becker said. "Until someone comes up with a more efficient model, like planning site visits one after another in the same region, we cannot afford to run the program."
Becker promised to preserve the modules in the event the funding picture changes, but he believes they will require significant updating. Junior Engineering's chief problem is declining participation. The program must conduct about 180 visits a year to cover its costs, but visits have dipped to about 125 in recent years. Each visit cost schools $1,200, a little more if they include an evening program or the school is out of state. Usually the money doesn't come from the districts, but from PTA fundraisers or the state's School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration.
"In hard times, people say 'Let's get back to basics.' You'll see fewer schools visited and fewer field trips. The rural schools worry me the most," said Rhonda Menlove, a Cache County lawmaker and former elementary school principal. In her capacity as an associate USU provost, Menlove has worked to save Junior Engineering over the years, but she is not optimistic.
"I don't see a good source of funding from the Legislature or from the university," she said.
Still, there are signs that other science enrichment remains viable. Museums and other institutions say school field trips are not dropping, but some are expecting up to 10 percent fewer school buses next year. And Junior Engineering is not the only outreach available to Utah elementary schools.
Supported by $1.7 million in state funds and matching corporate and federal money, a consortium of six Utah museums called Informal Science Education Enhancement (iSEE) will continue to bring hands-on science to hundreds of Utah schools. The group includes the Utah Museum of Natural History, the Utah Science Center's Leo on Wheels program, the Clark Planetarium, Discovery Gateway, Red Butte Garden and the Living Planet Aquarium.
Each has staked out a piece of the state's science curriculum to support. The natural history museum's Museum on the Move program, for example, targets Utah environments and works mostly with fourth-grade classes, said outreach director Madlyn Runburg.
Collectively, iSEE reaches about 200,000 students a year in 2,100 school visits, covering all grades. But the group is expecting to serve slightly fewer schools next year.
Back at Uintah, teacher Steve Wills is describing centrifugal and centripetal forces and points to a bicycle to demonstrate how gyroscopes work.
"The faster something spins the more it wants to stay in that position. That's what we call angular momentum," Wills says to explain why a moving bike is easy to balance on two skinny wheels. Unlike other traveling programs, Junior Engineering explores a gamut of scientific concepts from weather to the senses, color to gravity, and engages an entire school for an entire day.
"The message to the kids is science is important," says Uintah principal Heidi Kunzler, who handled the materials years ago as a teacher in the Alpine School District. "They'll talk about it around the dinner table tonight."
