This week NSDL’s blogosphere reflects on the National Science Teacher’s Association (NSTA) annual convention in St. Louis in NSDL Road Reports, and muses about whether giant snowflakes really exist as spring makes a hopeful appearance in many parts of the nation.

The teachers who come to NSTA are no different from other professional conference attendees in that they are interested in sharing ideas about their day-to-day professional challenges with other teachers. How to popularize science to keep students engaged was a recurring “side” conversation at the NSDL exhibit booth and in the hallways at NSTA 2007.

“Kids are dumbing down,” lamented one science education coordinator from a large New Mexico shool district. “They don’t arrive in the eighth grade with the basic skills they need to progress. The one group in K12 education that is not accountable right now are the parents–they are not engaged in their children’s educations because they are so busy trying to maintain middle class lifestyles. They pass out expensive electronics like cell phones and computers instead of spending time teaching their kids basic skills.”

The recurring discussion about how educators might compete with students’ access to 24/7 multimedia, multitasking, and multi-technology has fueled interest in connecting students to science through popular culture and media. Many major publishers and museums who were exhibiting and doing workshops at NSTA had adopted parts and pieces from popular media in response. It was difficult not to notice that almost every 4th or 5th booth, from small education product companies to major publishers, was selling or promoting something related to teaching forensics, or aspects of physical anthropology, including the bones!

A volunteer from NSDL project partner the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, talks with teachers at the NSDL Exhibit Booth at NSTA.

A few years ago “bone science” was not a disproportionately big K12 topic. A physical anthropologist friend I know has had an academic career spanning an era of shrinking budgets and discussions about the merits of even offering physical anthropololgy as part of an undergraduate program. The interest that the CSI television series has sparked in making students willing to participate in learning not only investigative skills, but also in planning related science careers, is a net gain for science educators at all levels. At the same time some educators feel like it’s time to stick-fork-in-it-it’s-done with respect to using the TV show as a springboard for science learning. In spite of overuse, CSI-like off-shoots in the form of curricula and lesson plans still feel like the kind of general public interest in popular science that the 15-20 thousand science teachers gathered in St. Louis last weekend were looking for to engage students and their families in active STEM learning.