Science Outreach - And We've Got T-shirts!

Science Outreach is a program at Lewis-Clark State College that was started by Dr. Matthew Brady.  The idea is to get elementary school kids excited about Biology (and a little Chemistry).  Teachers from the elementary schools invite him into their classrooms to teach a little segment on a subject that they have been learning about.  Bats and Owls are the popular programs in the fall.  Insects, Marine Life, and Mammals of North Idaho are also popular choices.  The popularity of the program started to grow, and Matt couldn't handle it entirely on his own anymore.  The answer?  Recruit science majors to assist him with the specimens, and then eventually delegate the teaching of these programs to students as well.  I have been with Matt's Outreach program every semester and I absolutely love it.  Going out and working with kids is so much fun, and they always amaze me with how much information they already know!  Some of their questions are really good and they really get a kick out of all our specimens.  Outreach is great, but we were missing one thing...t-shirts.

I took it upon myself to fix this problem.  I figured if we were a legit program, we should have a form of identification, so last spring, I painstakingly designed a shirt logo.  It's pretty simple, but each image on the shirt is a symbol for something that we talk about, and the Gummy Bear is an inside joke.  At any rate, I was really excited and I brought my design in for approval.  We had an overwhelming number of students in Outreach last semester - too many - and while they all liked the design, we couldn't agree on a color scheme and the project kind of got dropped.  I was bummed.

This semester, it's just me and one other girl.  I decided I was making my t-shirt and if anyone else wanted one, they could order it themselves.  Of course, I had one made for Matt, too, since he's the founding father of Outreach.  I picked up our shirts this evening and they're everything I dreamed they would be...

Now I just hope we have some more Outreach requests this semester...