Co-founder, Shaunalynn Duffy Co-founder Alec Resnick. Photos courtesy of Sprout.

By Julia Fairclough

Abbe Cohen went to the carriage house at 339 R Summer St. for two reasons. She wanted to see how she could expose her four-year-old daughter to science in a kid-friendly way, and she was also curious as to what Sprout was all about.

A write-up in the local business magazine Somerville Scout was enough to tell her that Sprout was a collective of community scientists, "united by a passion for playful experimentation and a desire to become better learners, teachers and doers."

Cohen, an engineer herself experienced in robotics, was pleased to find out that all it took was giving Sprout a call, and then showing up to chat.

Co-founders and friends from MIT, Alec Resnick, Michael Nagle and Shaunalynn Duffy — all in their 20s — aim to work with the community to hold science forums as a supplement to higher education. They hope to meet people in offices or homes, libraries, coffee shops, schools, or wherever a group asking to learn from them would prefer.

"People have different relationships to science; they are either a grad student, have done some studying, or have a passion for it and want to learn but don't really understand it," Resnick said. "We are really about finding a group of people to learn with, and finding a group of people to learn from."

For example, schools prototyping new ideas can work with Sprout, or a group of people who want to invite Sprout into their home to talk about the scientific aspects to cooking. If someone, after taking a science class, wants to learn more about DNA, they can call Sprout. If people want to learn more about Wikipedia searches, they can ask Sprout to join them for a learning session at Diesel Café. The possibilities are endless, Resnick said.

When meeting with Cohen the other morning, Resnick asked what she envisioned. Cohen admitted she didn't have a ready-made idea. She has worked in consulting since becoming a mother, and is out of the loop with science as education.

Resnick talked about one of his newest projects. He is working with Green City Growers, a Somerville business that installs raised garden beds in peoples' back yards. Resnick is creating a suite of programs for Green City Growers to obtain a better sense of how to best grow food. He is using censors to collect data for soil activity, such as moisture and amount of sunlight.

"Our goal is to make gardens a learning experience from a scientific angle for those who don't know about pH, for example, and want to learn more about the data," Resnick said.

The conversation with Cohen went on from there, before finishing up by discussing possible connections with other Somerville organizations and companies, as well as Sprout's upcoming "fix-it night," where people will bring something to fix or repurpose and "tinker socially."

Resnick, who studied at MIT and then left during his senior year, said Sprout is an evolution of his dream to start a community college. He got the idea for Sprout from a friend, who started an invention workshop. Resnick thought that was a good model for science.

Sprout's founders have varied resumes. Among other projects, Resnick has helped schools build hardware to measure temperature and run after school programs for the Community Charter School of Cambridge. Nagle also teaches after school programs, and began a day camp for students called Camp Kaleidoscope in Cambridge in 2006.

Duffy, meanwhile, is active in the arts and performance scene in Cambridge and Somerville and is currently running a creative math class for home schooled and public school students at Sprout. In addition to teaching, she worked with a New York City-based theater company specializing in street performance and puppet theater.

Duffy noted that out of the three of them, she is coming from the most humanities-based background.

"What is exciting to me is that for a long time, even while at MIT, I felt like I wasn't a technical person, or a person who could learn programming," she said. "A lot of this is gender and cultural around technical stuff."

But what is exciting for Duffy is that she is interested in scientific investigation, which led her to master programming and basic research. Her angle is to make science more story-driven instead of what is often incomprehensible for people without science backgrounds.

For example, Duffy is mixing performance with science. Sprout runs a series of Spaghetti dinners, and for an upcoming dinner on Nov. 19 (at 7:30 p.m. at the Sprout headquarters) she will invite a friend, Peter Buchak, an accomplished accordion player. Buchak will play and then talk about how air flows over an accordion reed, but without the scientific equations involved. He'll also show videos of models he has built to help illustrate the science involved.

"I play clarinet, a reeded instrument, and always wondered how this piece of wood made sound," Duffy said. "I'm excited to see how people respond to this."

Sprout's office on Summer Street is open to the public, and anyone is free to come in and use equipment. They're working to get the community education programs up and running, which Resnick hopes will be supported by some programs having a sliding scale participation cost so that programming is available free of charge to those who need it.

"In the long run, I want to open up resources that are in the community as much as possible," Resnick said.

Information on upcoming events and class information is available at www. thesprouts.org.