Nearly five hundred students from grades 4 through 10, parents, and teachers met U.S. astronaut Mark Polansky and attended science workshops during the fourth annual Onizuka Science Day on Saturday January 24, 2004. Subaru Telescope contributed to the event by brining one of the twelve displays and sponsoring one of the seventeen workshops at the event. Lucio Ramos, electronic technician at Subaru, brought his own brand new computer to help students become comfortable working with computer hardware in a workshop titled “Think Inside the Box!”.

Onizuka Science Day is day of science and space sponsored by a wide range of community organizations in honor of Ellison Onizuka, an astronaut born and raised on the Big Island of Hawaii who died in the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986. The strength of Onizuka Science Day is the combination of solid science workshops, the excitement of meeting a real astronaut, and the sense of personal connection that is established between the students and people working on the forefront of technology.

“I want kids to know that they can do it too”, says Lucio. “ I grew up looking at Mauna Kea thinking that one day I wanted to work with the telescopes. It took some hard work and some dedication, but now here I am working at Subaru. I volunteered so that a kid could come to my workshop and say ‘hey, this is cool and I could do it too!’. What they actually said was ‘how can I upgrade my computer?’, and that’s a good start.”

Details about Onizuka Science Day are on the web site
http://www.spacegrant.hawaii.edu/OnizukaDay/ (English only).

Lucio Ramos, electronics technician at Subaru Telescope, shows students how to “Think Inside the Box” by dissecting a PC. Photo by Kumino Miura

Subaru Telescope’s display booth at Onizuka Science Day. Along with posters highlighting scientific results from the telescope, a refracting telescope (shown here) and a reflecting telescope (like Subaru) were part of the display Photo by Rich Berner (Onizuka Visitor Information Station)

Feb. 27, 2004