826LA

I’ve been volunteering at 826LA. What fun!! All the retired teachers out there need to join me. All the fun of teaching and playing with excited little kids, with none of the district or admin BS.

I want to use their massive flow of happy and inquisitive kids to begin collecting good questions. I am planning to put together a science weekend workshop to teach problem solving and question asking at the Mar Vista store.

So, I’m looking for some good experiments around which to build a 3-4 hour class that will require the kids to try and devise and test hypotheses. I looked at lots of science experiments for kids at the Exploratorium and elsewhere, and they almsot all fall into the gee-whiz-natural-history  category, not the how-can-we-figure-this-out category, which is  the key lesson we need here.

Nini came up with a couple of good ones. The Mentos meets Diet Coke testing, and a puzzle pipe where one needs to do some reasoning and testing to find out what is hidden inside a short piece of PVC pipe with holes though which some ropes emerge and by which one can manipulate the contents. They currently have a workshop (I think) where the kids try to use various materials to prevent ice cubes from melting. These sorts of engineering challenges like egg drops, are great to develop problem-solving skills.

When I was a kid, Christopher and I had a long and not very successful rocketry program. We made a few cool explosions, a lot of lovely fireworks and started a bunch of fires in his backyard, but never a successful rocket flight. In a parallel line of inquiry, we made a giant box kite with to test the capsules in which we planned to send our pet hamsters aloft. The kite, Archimedes, did take a frog in a capsule hung under a parachute up several hundred feet, although a Joshua tree fouled our trigger release line  causing early deployment, and the strong wind kept our parachute from fully deploying, but the excellent multilayer cushions of the capsule allowed out frogstronaut to survive the fall unscathed. I think the frog had to be substituted for a hamster because I, in one of the most idiotic lapses of my life, had tragically and absent-mindedly squashed Christopher’s hamster by forgetting that it was asleep in my pocket when I laid down on the floor in his hallway to play a game of Life.

The Answer is…

…Asking a good question. How we ask determines the answers we get. The core of this effort, to get people who are not and will never be interested in STEM careers to understand the power and primacy of scientific inquiry as the source of truth and knowledge, is going to hinge on collecting good questions.

So much science education is couched in the revelation from authority fallacy, and so much is about trying to turn kids on to an interest in the working of the universe. We shouldn’t want them believing that Mr. Wizard has the answers. This opens them to believing that Fox News, Ayatollah X, Bill Maher or Michael Moore have the answers. We want them to understand how to find answers, or at least respect the process and not the personalities.

Questions like what is the Higgs boson, what was the biggest dinosaur, or why is the sky blue, all beg for an answer from an authority. They are questions that are beyond the ability of an average person to discover the answer to on their own, they are the province of big science. But questions like: what is the shortest route to my school, what would happen if I never cleaned my room, how does my choice of shoes affect my friends, who can tickle whom, are questions we can answer of ourselves, and in trying, come to understand how to solve problems.

So the first step in this process is to collect questions. We have a chicken and egg problem here. We cannot make a program until we have a sufficiently large set of questions to address, but we cannot solicit questions until we have a program. Therefore we need to divise a system for collecting a large volume of authentic questions from which we can select. How can we do this?