UC San Diego Science Project
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Partner With Us on K-12 Outreach and Community Engagement
Your research belongs in K-12 classrooms.
The UC San Diego Science Project helps UC San Diego researchers turn their science into classroom experiences teachers can use, and builds the evidence that makes broader impacts plans credible to reviewers. We also scale and spread your resources through statewide and national networks.
Why Partner With Us
Your science, multiplied
One teacher brings your work to 30 to 150 students this year, and to a new group of students every year after. Teachers also share what works with colleagues, so your impact grows and lasts well beyond your grant.
Teacher networks already in place
More than 800 educators are part of our network in San Diego and Imperial Counties and beyond. In 2025 alone, teachers took part more than 280 times in our programs on climate, physics and music, assessment, and engineering.
Teacher leaders who lead the work with you
Experienced classroom teachers with expertise in curriculum design, assessment, and facilitation. They make sense of your phenomena for students, give feedback on your tools, and lead the workshops that bring your science to other teachers. In 2025 they co-authored the Understanding Global Change Playbook and wrote 34 ATLAS performance tasks.
Designed for our region's students
We design for multilingual learners and communities historically underrepresented in science, so your work reaches the students who are too often left out of it.
A statewide channel
As a regional site of the California Science Project and a leader in the California NGSS Collaborative, we can share your work through a statewide network of science educators.
How Our Partnerships Work
- Plan. We help you write a realistic outreach and engagement plan for your proposal, provide a letter of collaboration, and scope an outreach budget.
- Co-Design. Our teacher leaders work with you to turn your research into standards-aligned lessons, units, performance tasks, data activities, or interactive tools that bring your discoveries to life for students.
- Teach. Teachers try the materials with their students. You meet them through workshops, classroom visits, or our Teacher/Researcher Collaborative series at Birch Aquarium at Scripps. What teachers and students learn feeds back into the next round of co-design, so the materials improve with each cycle.
- Share. Finished resources get a permanent home in our curriculum hub on the UC San Diego website, and reach educators through our newsletter and blog.
- Evaluate. We evaluate implementation and impact, so your annual reports and next proposal can cite evidence.
What We Offer
Choose any combination of services. Most partnerships start with one or two and grow from there.
Outreach Planning and Proposal Support
Plan development, letters of collaboration, and outreach budgets for NSF, NIH, NOAA, and other funders.
Curriculum and Performance Tasks
Lessons, units, and three-dimensional assessments aligned to NGSS and the California Science Framework, developed with practicing teachers.
Teacher Professional Learning
Workshops and institutes where teachers learn your science directly from you and plan how to bring it to their students.
Research Experiences for Teachers
Placing teachers in your lab or field work, with support to turn that experience into classroom practice.
Dissemination
A stable, accessible home for your resources on the UC San Diego website, shared through regional and statewide educator networks.
Evaluation
Surveys, implementation studies, and classroom stories that show what changed for teachers and students.
Partnerships in Action
Listening to Waves
An NSF ITEST-funded partnership with Victor Minces that connects the physics of sound with music. Its free web applications (a signal generator, oscilloscope, and spectrogram) were used about 495,000 times in two years, and its workshops have reached more than 350 teachers in California, Arizona, and Puerto Rico since 2022.
SoCal Heat Hub
An NSF-funded hub at Scripps Institution of Oceanography studying extreme heat in our region. Together, we turned its urban heat research into the Climate Champions Design Summit, where teachers co-designed classroom resources with scientists, including the Cooler Communities unit, in which 5th graders investigate why some neighborhoods are hotter than others. The summit is co-hosted with Birch Aquarium at Scripps Oceanography.
Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Don't Freeze My Feet
A partnership with Dr. Itay Budin, Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at UC San Diego. Through Lesson Study with Sweetwater Union High School District teachers and a 2025 design day, his research on lipids became a published performance task for grades 9 to 12, in which students use the chemistry of fats to explain how reindeer keep their feet from freezing.
What Teachers Say
"I did the lesson on listening to simple waves and the kids loved it. They were very engaged and the resources were amazing. I am definitely using it again next year, and I shared it with some of my colleagues."
"Thank you for bringing the Saturday workshop to our district! My students were interested and engaged, and I had so much fun teaching it."
"This project helped students see that science is not just something learned from a textbook; it is a tool for understanding and improving the world around them."
"It is really helpful to have current data from our communities, and the Understanding Global Change model template is great and user friendly."
"Thank you for making this whole program so teacher-friendly! The links are so clear, the resources are great, and being able to print double-sided icons in Spanish and English is amazingly helpful."
"I'm now excited to teach waves and sound instead of dreading it. I have a much better understanding of the topic, and I'm excited to see how my students do with the lessons."
What Researchers Say
"I've worked with Alec over the past four years on the broader impacts portion of my NSF CAREER Award. He's really great at facilitating and makes it very easy for faculty to make an impact at the K-12 level."
Ester J. Kwon, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, UC San Diego
"Thank you for all your support getting our proposals submitted. I am very excited about this work and look forward to working with you."
Ellen Breen, Ph.D., UC San Diego
"Bringing together Scripps Oceanography and Birch Aquarium with the UC San Diego Science Project and CREATE, we leverage our history of collaboration and great strength in K-12 science education. With our networks and experience, we have the capacity for broad impact that benefits society."
Nan Renner, Ph.D.
Get Started
Writing a proposal?
Contact us at least two weeks before your deadline. We will help you shape your outreach and engagement plan and provide a letter of collaboration.
Already funded?
Let's turn your outreach commitments into classroom resources and teacher experiences that last.
Or email us anytime at sdsp@ucsd.edu.