Sciencey Heroes For Young Children?

An anonymous reader writes "Unhappy that all his friends have heroes he knows nothing about (they've all chosen hockey players — actually a hockey player: Sidney Crosby), my eight-year-old son asked me if I would find him a 'cool hero.' When pressed to define 'cool,' he very earnestly gave me this list of acceptable professions: 'Astronauts, explorers, divers, scientists, and pilots.' A second and only slightly less worthy tier of occupations includes 'inventors, meteorologists, and airplane designers.' To be eligible for hero status, an individual must be (1) accomplished in one of these fields, (2) reasonably young (it pains me to report that Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, NASA's youngest astronaut and now just 31, barely makes the cut), and, critically to my naive son's way of thinking, (3) respected by third graders nationwide. Ignoring that last criterion, or not, what heroes would you suggest from the sciences as people whose lives and accomplishments would be compelling to an eight-year-old mind?"

Comments

Here's a few

[mknewman]

Mythbusters Adam and Jamie, Dean Kamin, and even Mike Rowe come to mind.

Re:Here's a few

[AnonymousClown]

They're TV performers - none of them studied science academically - what? Russian Lit and no college for the other one?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be my best suggestion.

Re:Here's a few

[Martin Blank]

The willingness to revisit myths is a hallmark of the scientific process, though. They have a hypothesis -- the myth -- and collect initial evidence to determine a certain level of plausibility. They then move to large-scale experiments. In some cases, their experiments disprove the hypothesis. However, upon peer review (using the term loosely), problems with their experiments may be pointed out, and they revise and rerun the experiment. Sometimes the original results are overturned, and they can, to some degree, form a theory.

The Mythbusters are the first to claim that what they do is more entertainment than science. You just don't often hear things like "Jamie wants big boom" coming from real scientists. But normal people learn from their abbreviated process anyway, as you said, and that's what is important right now.

Re:Here's a few

[Anonymous Coward]

The average layman won't be affected by any of this "research". They merely demonstrate the scientific process in a shortened form. Why is that so deplorable to all of you? They didn't say "I ate a bagel today and don't have cancer. BAGELS CURE CANCER!!!!!" They're testing wives' tales. If they teach people the basics in "think of a question/topic, make a reasoned hypothesis as to what happens, find a way to test it, get some results, OH WAIT someone pointed out an error ==> retest it, have a conclusion" that's what's important. Get off your high horse.

Re:Here's a few

[Anonymous Coward]

You just don't often hear things like "Jamie wants big boom" coming from real scientists.

Thus proving that you dont actually know any real scientists.

Re:Here's a few

[Boomerang Fish]

I'd have to agree with this on the level of likely media awareness of a young child... if you're looking for heroes he won't have to explain, then these are probably the most scientific... not rigorous in the sense of a University Physics lab, but a heck of a lot more rigorous than most anything else that gets wide media attention... identify what to test (myth), give initial hypothesis (explanation), identify how to test, revise if necessary, test, scale up, come to conclusion, revise in later shows, re-test, etc.

Other "heroes" to consider might be internet entrepreneurs, who while not being scientific themselves, managed to take new technology in directions not grasped before... Facebook, Google, Netscape... might be more commercially oriented than you want, but still, it's an area your son and his friends will know well soon, if he doesn't already.

Unfortunately true scientific or mathematical skill comes with a lot of background work and most don't get the credit they deserve, even when older, but definitely not while they're still learning.

I told my daughter (now 17) that true skill takes time, and the flashiness of athletes and movie stars almost always dies quickly... a few make it, but thousands don't. I tried to teach her (I hope successfully, and her math and science grades suggest I might have succeeded at least a little bit...) that a hero is one who sticks to her guns, as long as the evidence supports her, and isn't afraid to admit when they were wrong and change their theories. The hero is one true to the search, not the result... cause it only takes one bad result to take you down.

Hope this helps in some small way :-)

--
I drank what?

Re:Here's a few

[stiggle]

Their research is the most important possible for the kids of this generation.

No kid is going to get excited about science and go "yay, I want to be a scientist and study string theory". They are more likely to want to play with focusing mirrors to make fire, to use high pressure water hose to make jetpacks.

Mythbusters shows that you can make cool & interesting stuff at home which will get kids interested in becoming the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Re:Here's a few

[DavidTC]

Dude, the layman has no idea how science works at all.

Almost no one in this country can even give an brief summary of the scientific method. Almost no one knows how science works at all, in any manner. They can't give any explanation of what scientists actually do or how they do it.

Complaining about the Mythbuster's lack of rigor is like complaining about how teaching Maxwell's equations ignores quantum effects.

And I'll point out that science doesn't require rigor. Or, more specifically, it requires as much rigor as the field requires. As the Mythbusters are operating in their own field of 'urban legend', perhaps that field has exactly as much rigor as that field wants.

You want more rigor, you start doing scientific research in that field and start complaining about their lack of rigor, until then, shut up...you don't get to define how much rigor is needed for random field of science. Different fields have different accepted standards. Until some distinguished 'urban legend' institutions start criticizing their lack of rigor, and stops using their results, they have enough.

Re:Here's a few

[cowscows]

Yeah, the reality of science (like the reality of just about any other field you can choose for a profession) is that 95% of what you do is completely boring. Almost every job in the history of the world is like that, and will continue to be so until those lazy ass computer scientists finally figure out Artificial Intelligence and we can truly have machines do all of the mundane tasks.

Real science takes lots of dull repetitive work. Good, useful results have to be weaseled out of mounds of noisy data and dead ends. That kind of work is not fun to watch, and is certainly not going to appeal to kids or get them interested in science. For every touchdown that Drew Brees throws, he's spent hours watching film, running drills, and working out in the gym, yet for some reason the NFL doesn't try to make us watch all those hours of boring work. They show the good stuff, and that's what keeps people interested in football. The Mythbusters sort of do the same thing for general science.

Carl Sagan

[Ninja Programmer]

There is no other.

Re:Carl Sagan

[syousef]

There is no other.

Be careful with role models. By all accounts he was a brilliant science popularizer and a better than average scientist. But he was also petty and arrogant and thought a lot of himself and treated women badly. Read one of the biographies. I think that is what you should teach kids - that even their heroes and role models may be exemplary in one or more areas of life without being perfect or even acceptably good in other areas. Therefore only emulate the good, and don't be disheartened when you learn about the bad.

That said every child should watch COSMOS at least once and read a few of his books. Pale Blue Dot and Demon Haunted World would be my recommendations (though I'm sure some of the more religious types will disagree with the latter).

Re:Carl Sagan

[houghi]

But he was also petty and arrogant and thought a lot of himself and treated women badly.

Sounds like he is on par with the current sports heroes.

Who needs a hero?

[Anonymous Coward]

You kid seems smart. Maybe ask why he feels the need to have a hero? And why this hero needs to pass some sort of test of being 'accepted by your kids peers' ?
I understand the need for kids to fit in somehow, but maybe he can transcend this.

Re:Who needs a hero?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Maybe ask why he feels the need to have a hero?

Isn't that kind of like asking why you need to visit the moon?

Heroes inspire us to make ourselves better than we are.

what?

[X_Bones]

no love for the safe-crackin', bongo-playin', Challenger-investigatin' Richard Feynman?

Wile E. Coyote

[martin-boundary]

My science hero is Wile E. Coyote. He's the reason I became a scientist in the first place. As a kid, I had always been very impressed by how even the simplest scientific approach would always allow Wile E. to capture all those pesky Road Runners with ease.

I can honestly say that without him as a role model, I would never have become a physicist or discovered how to paint the dimensional portal which brought me to this world years ago.

Unfortunately, the rules of physics seem to be slightly different here for some reason, and I have been stranded ever since. Oh well...

Re:Wile E. Coyote

[Gravitron 5000]

Are you familiar with the teachings of Rube Goldberg? His method, while fundamentally similar, may shed some light on your problems.

Airplane (Spaceship) Designer

[NonSenseAgency]

Burt Rutan, spaceships have got to be waaay cool to an 8 year old.

Re:the youngest billionaire in the world of course

[jordanjay29]

I don't think 8 year olds are allowed on Facebook. It's 13 and above, last I checked. Larry Page or Sergey Brin would be more worthy heroes, I'm sure the kid uses Google at least once a week, versus using Facebook never.

Ok...

[geminidomino]

Admit it... that was a major "proud papa" moment.

Re:Find a hero for me, daddy?

[camperdave]

I thought it was a parent's job to hunt around for acceptable role models for their kids.

Gee! I always thought it was a parent's job to *BE* an acceptable role model for their kids.

Reasonably young??

[fishexe]

To be eligible for hero status, an individual must be (1)...(2) reasonably young (it pains me to report that Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, NASA's youngest astronaut and now just 31, barely makes the cut), and, critically to my naive son's way of thinking, (3)...

Since when do 8-year-olds know the difference between 45-year-olds and 30-year-olds? They were all just grown-ups to me when I was that age. There were, like, 4 categories of people: kids, big kids, grown-ups, and old folks (technically a subset of grown-ups, but distinguished by completely gray/white hair and large amounts of wrinkles). I don't think I became aware of the difference between 45 and 30 until I was at least 11.

Why young?

[lawpoop]

Why do they have to be young? When I was in middle school, my hero was Einstein.

But, I don't think you're going to find a 20-year-old science hero, like you would a 20-year-old sports hero. To really have a science career, you have to have a PhD, and then some career after that. I think the best you can do is a 30-year-old with promising research, or a 20-year-old whose a promising genius, or made a great invention. Other than that, you're looking for a person who has a PhD + 10 years' work behind them.

Re:Find a hero for me, daddy?

[QRDeNameland]

Find your own hero, kid.

Better yet, if you think your kid has a love for science, tell him that both "coolness" and "hero worship" are antithetical to real science. Science is not a popularity contest, nor is science made great because it is done by a great scientist. Good science stands because it withstands further scientific challenge, and the personal characteristics of the scientist do not matter one bit.

Then past that, remember that no matter how things may appear, as a parent *you* are always going to be your child's most significant role model and whatever sports stars/rock stars/entertainers "heroes" your kid cycles through growing up will be largely irrelevant to how s/he fares in life.

Re:Scientific method != science

[walshy007]

I think the grandparents point is you don't need a university degree or any formal qualifications in order to 'study'

You can learn the current state of the art independent of any such institutions.

Using the scientific method does not mean that you are doing science. For example you could conduct a criminal investigation using the scientific method but that does not mean that what you are doing is science.

By that definition no applied use of science would be 'doing science' and for example physics students at university would not be 'doing science' because what they are learning has already been done before.

Science does not need to be new to still be science.

Re:Scientific method != science

[Roger W Moore]

You train to do science by repeating classical experiments.

True, but training to do something is not the same as actually doing it.

Re:only one true hero relevant for him

[dargaud]

Christa McAuliffe

Meh... School teacher only put there for PR reasons.