Five youth programs bring Raven Baxter to students online in 2020

Between May and October 2020, with schools closed or remote, Raven Baxter met students online through five youth programs in New York, Georgia and Maryland. The visits ran from weekly Instagram Live experiments for Buffalo teens to a Montgomery Blair High School magnet class on Oct. 20.

The first came on May 4. On the Instagram account of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, Baxter mixed pepper, water and dish soap to show how soap helps stop the spread of disease.

Three days earlier, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had kept K-12 schools and colleges closed for the rest of the academic year. BuffaloPAUSE, an eight-week digital challenge from the mayor's office, asked the city's teens to stay home. According to the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education, the city also wanted to reach young people in Buffalo's African American community, which had been "disproportionately affected by COVID-19."

Each Monday through June 8, Baxter went live with an experiment using household items. Teens ages 13 to 18 filmed themselves repeating and explaining it, and winners received Amazon gift cards.

"I want the teenagers of Buffalo to recreate the experiment and explain it back," Baxter told the Graduate School of Education. "I'm planning on increasing the difficulty of the challenges every week. The real challenge is communicating the science behind it."

"Science is relevant to everyday life. It shouldn't just be when a pandemic is occurring," she said. "The reality is we really should be thinking about science every day."

On June 10, Baxter joined girls in the Program for Girls & Young Women, run by EDsnaps and New Settlement in the Bronx, for an evening question-and-answer session on Zoom. EDsnaps founder Dr. Susanne Cappendijk, a neuroscientist, hosted the visit.

EDsnaps began on July 10, 2017 with a free summer pilot for seven female-identifying high school students at the Bronx Engineering Technology Academy. It now serves more than 250 students a year. New Settlement, a community-led settlement house in Mount Eden, has worked with Bronx youth and families for more than 30 years.

On June 13, Baxter presented at the Intrepid Museum Youth Summit. The free conference for ages 14 to 20 aims to create "an environment that promotes conversation, development and engagement for New York City youth." The 2020 summit was held online. She returned to the museum in March 2021 to give the keynote at its Girls in Science and Engineering Day.

On Sept. 17, Baxter gave a virtual keynote and then joined a student panel for GEAR UP Dougherty in Albany, Georgia. The session was part of the district's National GEAR UP Week programming. GEAR UP is a U.S. Department of Education college-readiness program created in 1998. Dougherty's six-year, $11 million grant served 2,225 sixth and seventh graders from all four county middle schools, WALB reported in 2019.

Dougherty County had been hit hard by COVID-19 that spring. In August, a case surge kept its campuses closed.

On Oct. 20, Baxter spent about 30 minutes on Zoom with a class in Montgomery Blair High School's Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program in Silver Spring, Maryland. Montgomery County Public Schools had moved its whole first semester online. The county opened the magnet program inside Blair in 1985, offering accelerated, interdisciplinary courses.

"They really enjoyed it!" said Elizabeth Duval, the Blair science teacher who hosted the visit.

Baxter was then a doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo studying science communication, known online as Raven the Science Maven. In September 2020, Fortune named her to its 40 Under 40 in health.

The University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education's BuffaloPAUSE story is on its website.