Onboard a 52-foot-long retrofitted RV on the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s campus this week, local middle schoolers learned how to design, experiment and fail.
The Maine Mobile BIOLAB, a mobile bioscience laboratory that travels around the state with STEM educators giving lessons to students in grades 5-8, made a weeklong stop in Presque Isle to teach and experiment with students from across the area.
“Getting out to middle schoolers where they’re starting to form that science identity and getting them interested in STEM fields is one of the main goals,” BIOLAB STEM educator Heather Carlisle said. “We’re really trying to do that in these communities, to let them know that, ‘Hey, these STEM fields are right here in our backyards.’”
The lab is run by Portland-based nonprofit Educate Maine in partnership with the Bioscience Association of Maine, Northeastern University’s Roux Institute and nonprofit Learning Undefeated.
This week’s appearance was not the lab’s first time in Aroostook County. It held its inaugural school visit in Fort Kent in March of 2024, later followed by stops in Ashland, Caribou and Presque Isle.
“We visit big schools and we visit small schools,” Carlisle said. “We’ve rolled into schools and done programming where the entire eighth grade was four students. We will haul our lab up and come hang out with you for the week. No school is too small.”
With schools out for the summer, the BIOLAB is making stops at community locations like UMPI to give students from around the area the chance to participate.
“Ever since I did hear about it, I have definitely been counting down the days,” Dominic Jenkins, a rising eighth grader at Dawn F Barnes Elementary School in Caswell said.
Jenkins was among Tuesday morning’s group from the Presque Isle Recreation Department, which faced a challenge with Newton’s laws of motion. Their task was to build a rocket-propelled truck that would travel straight for more than two meters on its own.
As a real-world constraint, the middle schoolers were given a budget of $500 in fake money to buy the supplies for their truck. It’s a big challenge, but one each student embraced — some in unique ways.
“I don’t like science. That’s actually my least favorite subject,” Zippel Elementary School fifth grader Marcey Drost said. “But life is too short, so you kind of just have to.”
But the experience students get in the BIOLAB is not just tailored to science. It teaches them how to collaborate, and how to start over when their design comes up short of expectations.
“I think it’s really great when the students walk away having had a really engaging experience, where they may not have realized how much learning they did,” Carlisle said. “They’re embracing the scientific method, the engineering design process, [a] growth mindset and a lot of social-emotional learning comes out of it as well.”
Educators from the BIOLAB also held a community night at UMPI on Tuesday to engage the community with live music, food trucks and games.
Schools interested in hosting the lab can request a visit on its website.
