Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) High School Science Drag and Drop Activity

Description

Science class has a representation problem hiding in its examples: the scientists students meet rarely look like the full range of people who actually do science. This activity is a direct, ready-to-use correction for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month — students complete a drag-and-drop matching activity connecting AAPI scientists to their contributions.

It is designed to be genuinely usable in a science period, not a poster on the wall: students do the matching, meet the scientists through their work, and leave knowing contributions they didn’t know that morning.

What’s inside

• A drag-and-drop activity matching Asian American and Pacific Islander scientists to their contributions.
• Canva template and PDF included — run it digitally through Canva or print the PDF.

How it runs in class

Built for AAPI Heritage Month in May, the activity fits a single-period celebration lesson, a station in a heritage-month rotation, or an early-finisher and sub-friendly task with real content in it. The matching format keeps the cognitive load on the connections — which scientist, which contribution, why it mattered — and the Canva version makes it easy to assign in a 1:1 classroom while the PDF covers print rooms. It also opens a door many science educators want opened: a natural moment to talk about who gets to be a scientist.

Details

Grades 6–12 · Biology, Chemistry, Physics.

Beyond May, the activity works anywhere representation belongs in the curriculum: the first week of school, a scientists-of-the-field lesson inside any unit, or a hallway-display project where each student researches one scientist from the matching set in depth. The matching is the hook; the contributions are the content, and students reliably remember the people they had to correctly place.

Like the format? Try the Meiosis digital matching review or the Human Impact matching activity. Free resources are in the Free Library.