CABOT — Usually teachers do not want students browsing YouTube while in class, but an ad attached to an online video viewed in a science class started the process for one Cabot High School student to win a $5,000 scholarship package.
Cabot senior Erica Savage plans to major in theater arts at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, but she recently won a scholarship package from UTeach Arkansas by creating a 15-second online video that demonstrates a STEM — science, technology, engineering or math — concept.
Erica’s science instructor, Lowell Sherrod, said he encourages students to find videos of experiments when they have downtime in class. After seeing the ad for the UTeach scholarship package, Erica knew she wanted to participate.
“After the bell rang, I went to my teacher and asked him if he had seen that video,” she said. “I told him I wanted to participate in it, but I didn’t know what to do.”
Erica and Sherrod threw around a couple ideas for her video. At first they considered making methane bubbles, but they eventually settled on a chemical reaction called an iodine clock.
In an iodine-clock demonstration, two colorless solutions are mixed together. At first there is no visible reaction, but the combination eventually turns dark blue. The two colorless solutions Erica used were an iodate compound and a starch compound. Depending on the ratios, the combinations change color at different times. The video shows four beakers of the combination with different ratios, and they change color at different intervals.
“If you’ve got the concentration right, you can make a clock with it,” Sherrod said.
Erica was chosen as one of three high school seniors who won the UTeach Arkansas scholarship packages, which included a $2,500 tuition credit at a participating Arkansas UTeach university, a laptop valued at $1,500, a graphing calculator valued at $250 and a $750 book voucher.
The participating UTeach universities are the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. Erica was already planning on attending UALR before she won the scholarship package.
UTeach representatives called Erica two weeks before they made the winners’ names public, but she was experiencing phone problems. Her phone was broken for two weeks, and after she heard the voice mail, she was worried she had lost the scholarship by not responding.
“When I got a phone again, I finally got all of my voice mails, and they announced it over voice mail,” she said. “I had a panic attack. I was trying to call the university; I was trying to figure out who called me. I was worried they had given the scholarship to someone else. I was on the phone with university reps for two hours, and they didn’t know what I was talking about because the scholarship hadn’t been announced publicly yet.”
Fortunately, UTeach did not take Erica’s lack of response as a refusal. She was awarded the scholarship package and will be able to utilize it next year when she attends UALR.
“We were impressed not only by our three winners, but by all the videos submitted, which showed the depth of creativity among high school students throughout the state,” Lisa Palacios, chairwoman of the UTeach Arkansas Board, said in a press release. “These entries demonstrated the real-world application and the fun that can be had with STEM subjects, and we are encouraged to know that this next generation of STEM teachers will pass on that excitement to future generations of students.”
Erica has been planning on majoring in theater arts, but the UTeach scholarship requires winners to take STEM classes, and now she will most likely have a double major with emphases in math and stagecraft.
“It’s all definitely connected,” she said.
To see Erica’s video, visit www.cabotschools.org/public/userfiles/News_Blogs/20142015/Science.mp4.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.