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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?"
His friends are all looking at sports heroes and you're looking at people with long careers. There's a big difference.
Athletes only have a few decades in which they'll do well, then they retire. So it's easy to find a younger athlete as a hero: as they get older, they lose it.
But almost all the other professions take time to get experienced in. They require learning and years of experience to excel, other than something like astronaut, which can include younger people.
Too bad you can't include people like Chuck Yeager or Wiley Post.
Back in the day, real photographers were all chemists. Thus the photography link with a chemistry kit (and web fluid).
Buckaroo Banzai
Werner von Braun, Hermann Oberth, Robert H. Goddard, Yuri Gagarin. -Space nut, out.
How about a whole team of heros. See http://www.usfirst.org/ While I do not like everything about the program, the students really do catch some of the excitement of science and engineering.
Neil deGrasse Tyson I wish I read his book "The Universe Down to Earth" when I was in grade 9. I think it would have greatly shaped my school pathway for a 'real' science career. http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/
XKCD Zombie Feynman says, "so what?" They've got the spirit of it, if not the formalism and rigor.
This is even more the case since we're looking at examples for young children who need the showmanship and wouldn't appreciate the difference anyway.
See subject-line...
APK
P.S.=> He's a PRIME EXAMPLE of that "once in a generation mind"... apk
Airplane Designer Hero - got to be Willy Messerschmitt!
They have done quite a bit to advance the public's thinking of science, and without passing through years of deadlocked science conferences, unread magazine articles and academic review.
Then again, they've done this without those kinds of checks, which means that their science could be (and has been proved to be, on revisits of myths) incorrect.
He may be slightly too old to fit your criteria, and probably no 3rd graders have heard of him, but Saul Griffith is a certified Genius (so says the MacArthur Foundation, anyway) and does interesting and inspiring work.
PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla... you can literally change the world with technology, and get reasonably rich doing that.
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.
So what you're saying is that you're from Cool World?
Okay, but seriously, you'd probably like Phineas and Ferb, as would the kid in question. Not being real I guess they don't qualify as role models, but they're definitely worth watching until a real world role model shows up.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Not only did they test out a migration theory by sailing across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft, half of them were extreme badass commandos that blew up a Nazi nuclear facility in WWII.
Then there's the Easter Island stuff. While crappy TV shows say "who knows why these roads go into the sea" Thor put on the scuba gear and found they were boat ramps. When the crappy TV show said "who knows how the statues were erected" Thor asked the locals, put on a huge BBQ for them and they showed him how it was done.
Then of course there are plenty of other examples of people in science doing things kids will find heroic - vulcanologists in rubber boats on acid lakes, polar explorers and many others.
How about another Brian, a bona fide rock star (i.e. older than most people on /.) and also astrophysicist. Took a detour from his PhD work to play lead guitar for the British rock band Queen. Finally finished his PhD in 2007. Is one step from away from knighthood.
He's an inventor, scientist, author, futurist, musician and probably plenty more I don't even know about. And he's still alive... and hopes to be alive forever due to evolving technology.
"...The recipients include the engineer behind the digital camera, the Intel team that designed the first computer microprocessor, and the inventor of the adhesive 'super glue.'”
http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2010/11/17/obama-honors-scientists-and-engineers/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Galois (look him up!!) is long dead, but he was quite possibly the greatest genius ever to walk the planet. Too bad he was killed in a sword fight when he was 20. As a teenager, he solved a centuries-old math problem and created a fundamental branch of advanced mathematics.
I don't know if the average 8 year old would find Hawking heroic, but a kid as thoughtful as this poster's might well do so. And when are we going to get a Steven Hawking action figure? (Irony intended, but not in a mean way.)
Luckily, someone did a rewrite.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/spirit_rewrite_unknown_author.png
When I applied to MIT anno 1980, part of the application process was to write an essay titled, "What is my favorite cartoon character and why." So this was essentially a "Who's your hero" question. I chose Wile E. Coyote. The focus was about his persistence: despite that all his ingenious attempts to catch the Roadrunner with cockamamie contraptions failed, he never gave up. He always came up with something new to try.
The admissions folks loved it, and I got a call from the local MIT rep to come by for a chat. I was accepted, but chose Princeton instead. The application essays for Princeton were more difficult. I had to write a "Personal Statement" and an "Engineering Statement." No topics were given; "just write something about something." This was a more subtle way of saying, "find the hero in yourself." How children choose their heroes is determined by the values that they have developed under the guidance of their parents. If the parents are big hockey fans, a hockey player will probably be a hero for their children. If the parents take their children to science museums, a scientist will probably be a hero.
At any rate, don't underestimate the potential of writing about Wile E. Coyote.
Oh, and in defense of engineers, I took 300 and 400 literature classes at Princeton. After I submitted my first essay for one coure, the Preceptor called my aside after the class. She asked me point blank, "You're engineering student, aren't you?" She went on to say that engineering students wrote the most comprehensible essays, which were always structured very well. She complained that the literature majors' essays were more insightful, but tended to meander to the point of confusion.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Because he couldn't possibly be getting most of that back as profit now could he?
Two Latina mothers are heroes in the new banana book, Small Changes Big Results from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University. Their adventure is to actualize a convalescent affairs for their accouchement and families and action obesity. The animation moms are like real-life moms in Latino acreage workers' families, who are anxious about the growing blubber botheration a allotment of adolescent children, says Jill Kilanowski, abettor assistant at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University. As allotment of several analysis projects, Kilanowski advised over 200 accouchement on farms abreast Fremont, Willard, Urbana and Tipp City in Ohio and South Haven, Michigan. web designing company in chandigarh thanks
Who said you got to STUDY to be a scientist?
Being a scientist means doing original scientific research i.e. something that nobody has done before, otherwise it is called history.
This seems like an absurd view of science. None of the definitions i got from google say anything about originality directly. Perhaps you would care to furnish us with the one from your dictionary just so we can have the same true understanding that you have.
In the meantime I don't think I even understand how to measure originality. How am I to know what has been known in the past? If information is lost to the scientific community (eg. the burning of the library at Alexandria) is a subsequent study of that subject not science? What if I am stranded on a desert island, and I use the scientific method to work out how to grow/prepare food and work out which plants are poisonous. It seems like something very akin to science and I wouldn't call it history. Perhaps you are thinking of the value of science. If sufficient study on a subject has already been conducted then further scientific study has no value. Many of the definitions linked refer to something like this. The difference is that science is a noun not a verb. One is not producing science if ones results are already known. the definitions speak of producing solutions to problems for example. One cannot produce solutions to problems that are already solved. The scientific method is the method by which one builds science, not all applications of the method produce science, but any application that produces useful results has produced science. Another example might be if you do some scientific study that has never been done before, but you refuse to give me your results. I might do the same research to solve my problem, which is that you wont tell me your results. I might then achieve the same results as you and therefore solve my problem. The knowledge i would gain from this fits every definition of science on that list (except the band and album titles).
Discussions of originality aside, the quotes you responded to also stand, you dont have to study to do science, even by your own definition, and there are not only uneducated people doing reasearch by the scientific method, there are even some that are thereby producing original science as aresult.
Einstein was a patent clerk.
Da Vinci was a painter.
Priestley was clergy (he discovered oxygen, & invented carbonated drinks).
Since when was a lack of university education & a job in the field a requirement to be a scientist - all you need is the ability and interest to investigate the subject. Even better if you can encourage the next generation to become interested too.
Studying science academically just means you're taught what everyone else already knows and your thinking is moulded by your lecturers.
To make decent and safe explosions, you need to be a physicist as well as a chemist, and I'm sure most pyrotechnicians don't have either of those to degree level.
As a 9 year old girl, she debunked the whole Therapeutic Touch nonsense, with a sensible experimental design.
If it helps, she grew up to be a smoking hottie, as well as having brains to burn. IMO, young kids could look
up to her for both her critical thinking skills, and the way she was no swayed by arguments-from-authority of
the "we're older than you, so we know better" sort.