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

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!