- May 06, 2026
- By Georgia Jiang
Ask most people where their love of science began and they usually point to a specific memory: a meteor shower, a nature documentary or a visit to a museum. For Lenea Stocker, a senior lecturer in the University of Maryland’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, it was a high school chemistry class with a teacher who could conjure up lessons that looked like magic.
“Elephant toothpaste, carbon snakes—all of these neat things that just got me excited about chemistry. I couldn’t stop watching and wondering,” she said.
Decades later, Stocker is channeling that same spark into a one-credit course she launched in 2024, “Chemical Demonstrations and Outreach,” after years of fun chemistry demos for kids at Maryland Day and creating the grant-funded Kids and Chemistry Demonstration Day program for local elementary school students.
Now, on Friday mornings, Stocker coaches undergraduate students on how to perform chemistry demonstrations that foam, glow, fizz and erupt. Late in the semester, the students take what they learned into local classrooms, sharing the magic with wide-eyed third graders.
For the undergrads, the experience is as much about learning to communicate the science as it is about mastering it, Stocker says—to slow down, find the right words and rediscover what drew them to chemistry in the first place.
“And for young kids who’ve never seen science in action before, it lets them know that they can learn and play with chemistry too,” Stocker said.
Amy Lepore, a senior double-majoring in chemistry and biological sciences, was drawn to the class because of her interest in teaching.
“What I love is that we have the chance to ask a lot of questions and then test them ourselves. You have so much more fun and learn more when you’re doing it all firsthand,” Lepore said. “We always spend the last part of class making small adjustments to our experiments just to see if anything cool happens. It’s like we get to safely ‘play’ chemistry rather than just following a rigid list of instructions.”
Every week, Stocker guides the class through a new concept and demonstration. She curates the experiments in her syllabus for visual impact, safety and their connection to concepts already encountered in a chemistry classroom—including chemiluminescence (the emission of light from a chemical reaction), redox reactions (reactions in which oxidation states change), gas expansion, thermodynamics and more. Students often get to create keepsakes of their experiments; they have silvered the inside of Erlenmeyer flasks or transformed pennies into what appears to be gold through alloying, taking their results home as souvenirs.
But the centerpiece of CHEM 316 isn’t a memento, midterm or a lab report—it’s a field trip.
Each semester, Stocker’s students contact elementary schools in Prince George’s County, schedule a classroom visit, and show up with lab coats, safety glasses and a bag of Lego bricks. The Legos are for explaining atoms and molecules, allowing them to meet kids on familiar ground.
“My students also represent a wide range of backgrounds, and I can tell the children notice,” Stocker said. “These third graders can see a group of college students, real people who look like them, doing real science. And that sends a message no textbook can.”
For Joel Ukpelegbu, a public health and chemistry double major, that message is personal. As one of the students who helped pilot Stocker’s class, he recalled an outreach visit that ventured onto familiar ground.
“I went to my old school, which was a lot of fun. I used what we learned to make chemistry interesting for children,” he said. “I loved going there and teaching. The main takeaway I had was that it felt really meaningful for me to give back that way.”
Stocker customizes some of the demonstrations to make them interactive, allowing her CHEM 316 students to guide the elementary school students with a more hands-on approach. With an emphasis on safety and an understanding of the mechanisms behind the experiments, the demos help the participants build a foundation in science and research principles, one Stocker hopes will stay with them for years to come.
“I’m hoping that, especially [my students] who go on to teach K through 12, they can use some of these experiments and come up with ideas that impact their own students,” Stocker said. “That’s the chain reaction I had in mind.”