Our team has developed a series of science lessons that we present to elementary students twice a year in a program we call "Sciencing On Saturday" (SOS). The topics cover a wide variety of topics including Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Lego Robotics. Lessons are broken into levels. 1st & 2nd graders are combined, 3rd and 4th graders, and then 5th graders. We have been doing this program for four years, twice a year one in the fall and one in the spring. We have a large suburban high school (about 2000 students) and we market this to our feeder elementary schools. We charge $15 per session, our first Saturday we have around 35-40 students, we now average around 120-130 sessions slots on a Saturday. So we now bring in around $1800-2000 on a Saturday, and our costs are rarely over $300. We also offer a week long summer robotics camp for 4th and 5th graders, using the Carnegie Mellon Summer Camp on a Disk program. The 2 Saturdays and the week long camp gross around $6600, and our net profit is very high. Our S.O.S. program helped us with our region's Engineering Inspiration Award in 2011 and the Entrepreneurship Award in 2012. It is a great way to share your team's excitement for science and technology with young minds. What I really like about this program, is it allows our students to be leaders as they develop and teach the lessons to the elementary school students, and they improve their communication skills throughout this process. Plus our team does not have to compete with every other high school group trying to raise money selling candy, wrapping paper or whatever with only at best a 50% return.
To help teams start their own S.O.S. program we have a set of lessons, as well as other documents "on-a-disk" that we are willing to share. We have had other teams in our state that have done this also with some success. If you are interested in this just email our team at:
team2359@gmail.com and I will figure out a way to get the info to you.