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STREET SCIENCE: The BioBus, shown parked near Union Square to visit students at Frederick Douglas Academy III, gives students at urban schools lab experience that they might not otherwise receive.
Ben Dubin-Thaler

It's halfway through first period, and 10th-grade students at Frances Perkins Academy in Brooklyn are in science class—not in school, but on a specially outfitted bus parked outside.

The monitors above the microscopes flash into focus and the students are suddenly animated. "There's something moving!" "They're just crawling around." "That's crazy!" "Do we drink this?"

"Those are protists," Ben Dubin-Thaler tells the students. "And no, we don't drink this. This is puddle water I gathered in the Bronx."

Dubin-Thaler, or Dr. Ben as his students call him, is the founder of the Cell Motion BioBus, a high-tech, carbon-neutral laboratory housed in a retrofitted 1974 San Francisco transit bus. On this particular Friday last November, Dubin-Thaler is leading four classes of 10th graders in a microbiology lab.

A scarcity of scenes like this one in public schools has led to the mounting concern of parents, teachers and lawmakers about the state of math and science education nationwide. Just before Thanksgiving, President Obama gave a speech addressing the country's poor academic performance, quoting statistics that put U.S. 15-year-olds 21st in science and 25th in math compared with their peers around the world.

In that speech Obama also announced the launch of the Educate to Innovate Campaign. The effort proposes to elevate U.S. math and science rankings in the next decade by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to the recruitment and training of new teachers, updating technology in schools, and developing interactive learning content. Along with a range of other planned programs and events, these initiatives are aimed at getting kids interested in and excited about math and science, inspiring the kind of awe that the BioBus elicits among many of the students that climb on board.

Dubin-Thaler established the BioBus in 2007 with money from his savings as well as donations from friends and family a few weeks after receiving his PhD in biology from Columbia University. Now the BioBus is in the final stages of attaining nonprofit organization status, and provides hands-on science education to more than 10,000 students a year in New York City and the Midwest.

All of the equipment on the BioBus is research grade and has been donated or attained through equipment grants. Dubin-Thaler tries to target the BioBus to schools that lack the resources to offer quality lab experiences. For many of the students at Frances Perkins Academy the BioBus offered an opportunity to use a microscope for the first time. "As a school that doesn't have a science lab, to have something like that come to you is really awesome," says Erica Tunick, the teacher who joined her class for the lab. "Unless you're a really fancy private school, you're not going to have the equipment like they have on that bus."

The high cost of equipment is just one of the many economic challenges the campaign is trying to address—a challenge that Dubin-Thaler says mobile labs like the BioBus are uniquely suited to meet. "The BioBus is a 'shared facility' that provides students with access to equipment that is not affordable by any one school," Dubin-Thaler says. "Professional scientists maintain the equipment on board the BioBus, making sure that the science stays at the cutting edge, whereas teachers often do not have the time or proper training to maintain high-tech equipment in their schools."

Using computer equipment set up with the central microscope, students can take photos of the microbial protists they have found and produce a video of the moving organisms. For teachers such as Tunick this is one of the most valuable parts of the experience. "We took all these movies and pictures and we now have this great library of material that I can use to supplement our lessons," she said.