JMU to launch space explorers program at city Boys & Girls Club

Calah Mortensen didn’t have much of an interest in science until she took a cosmology class during her undergraduate studies. Now a graduate student at JMU, Mortensen is helping manage the John C. Wells Planetarium and organizing a program to deliver science to children who might not normally get the opportunity.

“If we don’t involve females or minorities in science, there will be things we’ll never discover, or it will take longer to discover them,” said Mortensen, a Rockingham County native and 2012 graduate of Broadway High School.

A $4,000 Innovative Diversity Efforts Award (IDEA) that Mortensen received with Planetarium Director Shanil Virani is fueling their effort to create a Space Explorers Club at the Boys & Girls Club in Harrisonburg in the fall. The city club is one of seven clubs in the Boys & Girls Clubs of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. Housed at the Lucy F. Simms Continuing Education Center, the club’s afterschool program provides activities for the kinds of kids Mortensen and Virani want to connect with.

“We’re trying to reach communities that otherwise may not have heard of us or there may be more of a barrier for them to come to the planetarium, so we wanted to go to them,” Virani said.

The weekly Space Explorers activities will be patterned after the successful Space Explorers summer camps that Virani has been running since 2013. JMU students with an interest in teaching, particularly science, will lead the activities that Virani said are designed to engage, excite and motivate children. “It’s about them getting involved and them having success in doing science and engineering,” he said.

Geared mainly for middle school students, the Space Explorers activities will take place once a week during the Boys & Girls Club afterschool program. Three field trips to the planetarium are also being planned. “We want them to see themselves on a university campus,” Virani said. “Many of these kids will likely be from homes where their parents haven’t attended college. JMU looks like a foreign country to them. We want them to come on campus, make them feel comfortable, allow them to see themselves being a university student.”

Said Lori Kizner, executive director of The Boys & Girls Clubs, “The Space Explorers Program will provide our youth with an opportunity to engage in science in a whole new way. The science lessons and field trips to the planetarium will add to our STEM programming, as we prepare our youth for the world ahead.”