Hands on Science Learning

An anonymous reader writes "Now that school is starting up, the perpetual challenge of making learning interesting and fun is back. The YesICan! Science project at York University has tried to help by creating activities for students which involve real-time (or recent) science experiments. For example, the current activity involves measuring the size of the moon using measurements of the solar position from a Russian nuclear icebreaker on its trek to the North Pole. Another had a webcast from the International Space Station. Are there other such resources out there to help bring real science into the classroom?"

Comments

Hands on science as a kid...

[Powercntrl]

My parents bought me one of those Radio Shack project kits that already had all the components with little springs attached to them. You'd simply hook up wires between things and let the magic smoke out. I'm sure if I had the paitence back in the day, I'd probably have actually made the AM radio transmitter and blinkenlights things like the manual said.

It's a good thing I didn't have the Internet back then, a potato cannon or a tesla coil would have been a lot more dangerous than just a little bit of Radio Shack brand magic smoke.

back in the day

[agnosonga]

when I was in elementary school, I remember:

drawing a blue whale actual size in the tennis courts with sidewalk chalk
making crystal radios
calculating the area of a puddle as an introduction to PI

just my few thoughts

Re:back in the day

[Smidge204]

I had a physics teacher like that. Every week we had a 'packet' due as homework. The packet included the usual homework problems and lab reports, and a 'home-lab'

The home lab was a real-life application of whatever topic we were on that week. Some of them were pretty dangerous, too :) For example:

-Calculate the mass of an object by tying it to a string and swinging it around your head.

-Estimate the friction between a car's tires and the road by having an older sibling/parent stop the car as quickly as possible (without skidding!)

-Estimate the total power developed by your body by running up a flight of stairs as quickly as possible.

-Explore the nature of levers by holding the snow shovel in different spots while shoveling (obviously, we had class over the winter session)

Each homelab would have to be completed just like a regular lab report would, stating goals of the experiemnt, control conditions, variables being tested, and results. The only difference was that there was n step-by-step instructions on what to do... you were just asked to do it and left to figure it out based on what you supposedly learned in class.

The interactivity really helps kids to remember that stuff. Now I do it for a living!
=Smidge=

And yet we wonder why children have no attention.

[taliver]

So, let's assume I've grown up with instant gratification. If I'm not having fun at every instant in my life, something must be wrong, right? I watch TV and play video games. If I'm at school, they are either playing nifty cartoon things or letting me dress up and crawl around like I was part of history, or I get to throw things around and pretend I'm learning science. What? I need to do some paper work that doesn't involve nifty artwork and pictures? I don't think so.

And when they have to discover things on their own, are they going to know how to do any background research? That's often not any fun...

Why don't children have any attention span? Because we don't expect them to have one, nor do we expect them to develop one.

Now, I know I'm starting to look like a "It's supposed to hurt" kind of educator at this point. Thta's really not what I'm saying. I believe that learning can be "fun", but moreso, that it can be deeply satisfying. Many athletes who have great fun at their sports absolutely hate practicing, but they do it anyway, knowing the payoff is worth it.

Here's one area where the sports coaches know what they are doing better than the educators. Walk out to a football practice sometime and tell me if you really think those students are enjoying what they are doing every minute.

Real experiments

[parvati]

One of the things I *hated* about my high school science classes (and some of my college classes) was that everything we did had been done before. Some of this was ok--looking at things through a microscope, for example--but when we had to do experiments in which we knew what the outcome would be, it seemed utterly pointless.

And then I took an Advanced Biology course. Our teacher found out that the town needed someone to survey a particular stream that ran through the town--look at the organisms present, measure turbidity, etc. She offered up our class, and that's what we did during most of our lab days (along with a fair number of our after-school hours) that year. At the end we wrote up a report and presented it to the town, and they used it to determine what sorts of development could be allowed in areas near the stream. It was pretty damn cool. I'm not saying that that class was the only reason that I'm currently in a PhD program for biological sciences, but it was definitely the first of a select few career-defining experiences.

My point here is that while repetition is the mainstay of real world science, it's not what should be used to pique interests. To the teachers out there: don't just order lab books full of tried, true and deathly boring experiments that have been done by a hundred previous classes. Come up with something that might actually make a difference--no matter how small its eventual impact on the world as a whole, its impact on budding scientists is massive.

Re:The real question...

[meridoc]

Experiments don't have to be huge, fancy-schmancy deals that take all day and have millions of data collection points. They can be more like snapshots. Try:

• Go outside (or stay inside with a tarp and high ceiling). Fill an empty film cannister 1/2 to 2/3 full of water. Drop half an Alka-Seltzer tablet into the cannister, and cap it tightly. QUICKLY put it down on the ground and back up. As the tablet dissolves, it'll fizz-fizz. The quickly-expanding gas will pop the top off the cannister. The experiment shows how gases expand. Alternatively, you can take a wide-mouthed balloon and put it over the cannister mouth to catch all the generated gas.
  
• Get slinkies and go to the staircase in the building. While in the hallway, you can have the kiddies make transverse waves and compression waves. Explain that big waves are loud noises (amplitude), and more nodes in a given length of slinky make for a higher pitched "sound." Then get a violin and/or guitar and play with pitches. Back to the hallway to make propagating waves (short, quick snaps at one end travel to the other and bounce back). This is how slinkies work on the stairs, transferring the energy. (Note: this experiement will stretch out the slinkies).
  
• Get a simple cake recipe. Divide up the kiddies into groups. Have each group omit one ingredient. You can do the baking if the kids are too young. Find out what ingredients do in the kitchen. (You might want to try the book How to Read a French Fry (and other links in that article) to get some ideas.)
  
• Take your fingerprint (finger on clean glass) and blow it up with the photocopier (alter some lines if you wish). Get some other fingerprints (about 20 is good). Make up a mystery (theft of magnifying glasses works). Have small groups match a found fingerprint to the suspects' fingerprints using transparancy sheets and markers (you mark only the ends of some lines). Have a discussion on whorls, loops, arches, and so on.
  
• Do a unit on the weather. There's usually lots of it. Cloud types, weather symbols on TV, how tornados form, what a front is, etc. Have the kids make their own "TV" forecast.
  

It's just thinking of things to do once you have a topic. Chances are, if you ever thought, "gee, I wonder how that works," the students in your class will too. Look it up!

Re:Should school be fun?

[Dread_ed]

There are two sides to this that I see.

1) Yes, you do take a risk by trying to make school "Fun," particularly if this is done at the expense of true education. There is no substitute for mathematical exercises, spelling list memorizations, reading etc. Thes things are irrepalcable, no matter how many multimedia presentations you try to substitute them with.

2) However, I can see the value in trying to excite students about a subject that mignt not, according to the students' perception, be exciting. The aim of course, is to expose students to a subject in a way that may stimulate their enthusiasm, and therefore have them motivated from their own desire and curiosity, rather than the simple reason of "I have to take this course." To restate, an engaged and motivated student will perform better, and will, hopefully, WANT to learn more. This is the kind of thinking that can overcome the doldrums of all the rote, sometimes boring, mechanical processes that are required to learn higher math and science.

The real victory for the student, and to a lesser degree the teacher, is when a student begins to enjoy the hard stuff. For myself, the turning point was in Algebra 2 in high school. Until that point, the exercises and problems were, naturally, a chore. Then, when we studied matricies with 3 and more variables, something changed. I actually stared to enjoy the "work" of math. The fun was in the process, in getting the right answer. I was able to carry this into college with me and it was by far the most important thing I learned in High School.

Vincit que se vincit.