Sir

Your News Feature “Doing it for the kids” (Nature 430, 286–287; 2004) highlights INSPIRE, a science-education scheme in the United Kingdom where postdocs pursue a teaching qualification while continuing with their research. Although there are many positive attributes to INSPIRE, your feature acknowledges the scheme's heavy reliance on special funding, which may disappear in the future.

As noted in the News Feature, the United States currently lacks programmes equivalent to INSPIRE. But there are other US programmes that achieve many of the same goals with the help of volunteers, and without the need for additional funding. One example of this is Kids Do Ecology (KDE), an outreach programme run through the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California.

This programme pairs postdocs at NCEAS with classes of 10-year-olds at local schools. Each volunteer scientist visits his or her class about six times during the spring, guiding students through the scientific process by helping them develop a research question and hypothesis, design experimental methods and conduct the experiment. At the end of the semester, students from each class present their projects to other students and the NCEAS community at a poster session. A description of the experiments can be found on each class's web page, hosted through the KDE website (http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/nceas-web/kids).

The benefits of KDE are many. It provides scientists with the opportunity to participate in community outreach, gives students some hands-on science experience and introduces a scientist role-model to the classroom. The programme requires a minimal time-commitment from the postdocs, about 20 hours in total on a volunteer basis, and consequently has a small budget. KDE is a sustainable model for getting scientific expertise into the classroom, and participation has remained high since its inception in 1997: 11 scientists visited classes at four Santa Barbara schools this year.

The framework for KDE is simple and effective, and could easily be adopted by other research institutions wanting to inspire student interest in science.