Students attending Trenton Young’s biology and botany classes at Hunter High School in West Valley City can count on doing more than just memorizing and regurgitating long-established facts from textbooks in both of those fields. 

They’re going to gain a curiosity that will foster a greater desire to learn the what, why and how of those scientific disciplines. 

And for that, a national organization has awarded Young a grant to help him continue to cultivate an environment inside and outside the classroom for greater original research among his students.

The nonprofit Society for Science in Washington, D.C., named Trenton Young one of 24 teachers from 12 states to receive part of $58,000 to “inspire hands-on discovery, changing students’ lives,” according to the organization. Young, who has spent eight years at Hunter, gets $2,000 of that to purchase equipment that will help him take a STEM-oriented approach to student exploration and experimentation a step further. “The Society for Science (is) specifically trained to push student research,” Young said. 

The grant will enable Young to buy two pieces of equipment to aid in the research. One of them is called a PocketLab Voyager. The pocket-size device will allow “students to explore physics, weather, climate studies and engineering topics via sensing capabilities” that measure several environmental factors that can be streamed in real time by way of an app to students’ own devices. In the case of Young’s students, it will in part help them study soil samples to learn more about their composition and impacts
on plants. 

Young says his approach to student learning through hands-on activities and discovery is part of a trend away from sitting in a classroom and reading, often via textbooks, and reciting the facts and findings of recent and not-so-recent scientists and researchers. “Science education in general has gone that way from when I was in high school,” he said. “I remember it being a lot of memorizing what scientists have
already learned.” 

Today, students are also “analyzing data, planning an investigation and asking questions,” Young added.  

Young said another grant he received helped start a school garden where he plans to have students grow a few plots of alfalfa, the number one crop grown in Utah, to learn how a particular type of fungus interacts with the roots and affects the plants. The ultimate goal is to find a way of growing alfalfa that uses less water and provides
higher yields.  

Young hopes to take his students’ research into the community by developing collaborative effort with Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District and the relatively new Tracy Aviary Nature Center at Pia Okwai in South Salt Lake to gather and study indigenous microorganisms from the soil to learn more about their impacts on plant and animal life. “If you can get experts in the field mentoring the different students for their different projects, that’s where we’ll find a lot more success,” Young said.  

“At a time when AI (artificial intelligence) is transforming industries and STEM skills are in high demand, Trenton is helping students gain the tools to become tomorrow’s scientific leaders,” said Society for Science Communications Director Apana Paul in a press release announcing the
grant winners. λ