On a drizzly fall morning, about 50 fourth-grade students from Belle Heath Elementary School in Radford arrived at Virginia Tech for a field trip that included a scavenger hunt in the student center and lunch in a dining hall.
One of the stops on the visit to the Blacksburg campus wasn’t a building, but a vehicle: the 4-H Pathway to Learning mobile lab, a 43-foot trailer hauled by a heavy-duty pickup truck. Inside the trailer, visitors from kindergarten through grade five can learn about life sciences at interactive stations.
The mobile lab started rolling around the state in April. So far, it has made more than 22 stops, from Lancaster County in the east to Dickenson County in the west.
When teacher Michelle Hall walked into the trailer with the morning’s first group of students, she immediately walked over to the brain science station. “Look!” she said. “We just talked about this.” Her class had just done a unit on the brain in science, she said. The trailer allowed the students to revisit it in a new environment, with models they could touch.
The mobile lab was funded by a portion of a $750,000 gift from the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation in 2022. The organization, which focuses on youth exploration of careers in health care, sought to bring more life sciences learning opportunities into rural communities.
[Disclosure: The Claude Moore Charitable Foundation is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
A team of educators from the Virginia Cooperative Extension, Virginia 4-H, the Claude Moore Charitable Foundation, and faculty and staff at Virginia Tech spent about two years developing the curriculum for the lab, said Alyssa Walden, deputy state leader for the 4-H youth development program.
Then the plans went to Exhibit Farm, a firm in Michigan that mocked up and then built out the trailer. The finished product was delivered to Virginia Tech in fall 2024.
Exhibit Farm also created Virginia State University’s Mobile Education Unit for its College of Agriculture.
Six activities await visitors to learn about emotions, emotional regulation, animal digestion, human digestion, brain science and the environment. Those six modules were chosen to “expose kids to a variety of different career paths that they could take in the sciences world,” Walden said. Each station has lesson plans available for grades K through five that match up with state learning standards for each grade level.
The Belle Heath students took apart plastic models to see the different parts of the brain. At the other stations, they traced their hands on a video screen to learn a breathing exercise to calm them during stressful moments. They visited the Clinch River on a virtual reality headset tour. They figured out how the parts of the human digestive system fit together, using stuffed felt pieces on aprons outfitted with velcro. They used magnetic puzzle pieces to learn about chicken and cow digestive systems. (The sixth activity about emotions was out of service that day.)
“If they take one piece of knowledge and go with it, it’s awesome,” Hall said.
The students were drawn to the virtual reality headsets. Some held their arms out as if they were flying as they viewed 360-degree aerial footage above Tazewell County before the camera dipped to the banks of the Clinch River and then below the water’s surface.
“When it started, it looked like we were so high up,” fourth-grader Lavanna Parker said, eyes wide and arms raised as she recalled the moment later.
Do chickens have teeth?
At the animal digestion station, Ryleigh Crabtree got students talking.
He asked similar questions over and over, two or three students at a time.
Do chickens have teeth?
How many stomachs do you have?
Do you eat rocks?
Crabtree, who’s from Lee County, is a freshman agribusiness major at Virginia Tech. He is a former state 4-H president and active in the 4-H Collegiate Club at Tech. He didn’t have class that morning and agreed to volunteer for a few hours.
“Do you know what roughage is?” he asked one group.
The kids shook their heads.
“It’s like hay,” Crabtree said.
The group nodded.
“Teaching kids about digestion was not on my bucket list,” Crabtree said during a break between student groups. “Especially not cow and chicken digestion.”
Once a contracted driver drops the trailer at a location, it’s staffed by trained extension agents, 4-H specialists and sometimes volunteers. Crabtree read over the lesson plan for his station a few times and referred to it as the first pairs and trios of students cycled through early in the day. But soon, he had the lesson down cold. The students responded to his confidence. One told him about the chickens she had at home.
There is no cost to schools or community organizations that want the mobile lab to visit. Local extension agents coordinate scheduling with the state 4-H office, Walden said. “It’s really designed to be … dropped in a place and stay there for a couple of days so that more youth in that area can be exposed to it.”
Trailer stops have ranged from county fairs and community events to weeklong visits at school division central offices to allow field trips from various schools.
Since April, the trailer has made about 22 different stops around Virginia. As of mid-October, more than 5,500 children had visited the lab.
Walden said a challenge of operating the trailer is balancing time on the road with time on site for learning. “We’re working on the logistics of, how do we maintain the integrity of the trailer?” she said. “Making sure everything is maintained and stays in working condition, giving some time for some maintenance of the truck and trailer, but still trying to serve the most people possible.”
For 2026, Walden said they’ll be targeting the trailer to parts of the state that may not have access to “this kind of high-tech, hands-on learning environment.” Work with the Claude Moore Foundation will continue, she said, to explore ways to support youth exposure to life sciences careers.
That might look like creating more mobile learning labs, or expanding current activities and lessons, or rotating out activities over time. “I think that’s going to be really important for the long term success of the lab,” Walden said.
