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

[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

[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.

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).

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.

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...

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.

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.