PORTLAND — When my Great-Aunt Izzy passed away, it fell to us to pack up her belongings from her home in Sanford. When we got to a certain kitchen drawer, we found the requisite ball of string made up of short pieces of string tied together. In the same drawer, we found a small brown paper bag filled with even shorter pieces of string and labeled “pieces of string too short to save.”

This culture of using what we have to its fullest potential is deeply rooted here in Maine. While it most certainly grew during the Great Depression, I think it has deeper roots in the psyche of people who learned ingenuity and innovation from a hardscrabble and sometimes unforgiving environment.

At the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, we often find ourselves tapping into this shared heritage as we look out over Maine’s science education landscape and imagine a science-literate public. What resources are available in the state? How can we leverage them to prepare our kids with the skills they need for life in the 21st century?

Certainly one of our biggest technological resources remains the state’s commitment to providing laptops and high-speed Internet access to every middle school student and their teachers. Maine led the country on this front as the first state to establish universal access to computers, and it has provided our students and teachers with an invaluable platform to enhance their education experience.

Maine also leads the nation with the highest installed base of smart meters. With 95 percent of homes equipped with these advanced electricity meters, almost all Maine families now have access to detailed information about their household energy use.

While each of these infrastructures is an asset to the state on its own, there is incredible benefit to fusing these resources together in an educational framework.

For the last year, we’ve worked alongside educators and Central Maine Power Co. to create a new science education program called PowerHouse. By connecting students with their families’ energy usage, they can explore complex questions through experiments grounded in personally relevant energy data.

One such complex question is how to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that fuel climate change. Global issues like climate change are challenging for adults to understand, let alone 12-year-olds.

We all see images of shrinking ice caps, stranded polar bears and unusual weather events but wonder whether there’s anything that we as individuals can do. PowerHouse provides students with a tool to help improve their household energy management and reduce their families’ carbon footprint.

By placing middle school students at the center of their learning and putting their focus on individual and family actions, we can bring science out of textbooks and onto the kitchen table. When students can engage with personally relevant learning, they comprehend that what they think, what they know, and how they act matters. Each of us has an impact on the world, and, with a little effort, it can be a positive one.

Kids have consistently proven that they can be forces of positive change in the habits of their household. If you doubt this, I encourage you to talk to a parent who has tried to skip recycling cardboard or plastic under the watchful eye of a middle school student.

Whatever career path students eventually choose, engaging them with science, math, and engineering is one of the most important things we can do to ensure their success in an increasingly complex world. The skills they develop while studying these subjects are exactly what is needed for both effective citizenship and professional success in the 21st century. Problem solving, critical thinking, communicating effectively and collaborating with a team – these are universal skills that will benefit all learners.

PowerHouse is a classic Maine story. By leveraging existing resources, Mainers are working together to create an unprecedented opportunity for Maine’s middle school students, while bringing Maine to the forefront of innovation in science education.

Great-Aunt Izzy would be pleased.

— Special to the Press Herald

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