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UPDATE – Curse yoou Peter Gluuckmaaaaaan! Always a step ahead of me :\\ (pmcsa.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Looking-ahead-Science-education-for-the-twenty-first-century.pdf)
I’d like to take a slight aside today, and talk about education and growing up as a scientist, and about the differences between the present and the past. And I guess gripe about education in general!
I’ve been reading about the life of Richard Feynman, who is one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. There are a lot of quite interesting things about the way he lived his life, and how he grew up and went through the education system, and I’d like to pick out a few of them. I think that learning about how an extremely successful person grew up can be of use to everybody, and particularly that it can help guide our approaches to the education of our children.
Feynman started playing around with electronic circuits when he was around eleven or twelve. He had a little ‘laboratory’ in his bedroom with a bunch of little lamps and a little heater. He later started to play around with radios, and learned to be pretty good at fixing them. Electronics has always been a little bit of a weak spot for me. I managed to avoid doing any classes in it at university, and didn’t even do any in high school either. So I found it fascinating that at the age of twelve he was learning and actually experimenting with electronic circuits! When I was twelve, the closest thing I was learning was wood shop.
At first I thought that twelve was a very young age to be playing with electronics, but when I thought about it I realised – well why not? It’s not as if children become smarter as they grow up, and the earlier you start working with something the more experienced you’ll get at it. So I started thinking more seriously about the idea of introducing school children to electronics much earlier in their education (let’s say in third form science) and I became really fond of the idea.
I think maybe that electronics was seen in education as mostly a trade skill, that it’s something that an electrician should learn, but that for most people it wouldn’t help them in life. And so with electrician training not being part of the general school system, it just stopped being taught. But I think that there is another group of students who would benefit greatly from learning electronics, and that group is science students! And I don’t think this because I think that most of them will be using electronics in later life, or even that the lessons learned are more valuable than those in other fields. I think that electronics is an important thing for science students to learn because it is such a playground.
Students learn best by far when they are interested in the material they’re studying, and one of the best ways to engage students is by getting them to do things in real life. Electronic circuits are easy to set up, have great measurable results (I made the bulb light up!) and have endless combinations of things you can do with them. And so, like Lego, it becomes very easy to play with electronics. Often in general, experiments have to be very carefully set up, and are a little limited in scope. But in electronics, you can give a student a breadboard and a boxful of components and they can easily take control, change things about and see the effects for themselves.
The syllabus for physics education in New Zealand is very heavy on theory. This is partly because of how crowded things have become under NCEA, and it means that there is less time for student led learning. You have to learn all of the things that will be in the test or you don’t pass, and there are tests all the time. So play turns to chore, delight turns to fatigue and experience and enthusiasm with experiments is lost.
Somewhere along the way, it seems that we have forgotten that the whole reason we have theory is to explain and predict experiments – not the other way around! In schools you perform the experiments only to verify the theory.
In actual fact, I would be an advocate for a complete overhaul of the science education system, from high school all the way through undergraduate degrees, but in the absence of large-scale changes I think that it would be very constructive for year 9 (third form) students to start learning – and even more importantly playing – with electronic circuits. It’s those two years before assessments begin that you still have time to play like this, and just maybe in doing this we could show students why they ought to give a damn about the theory we will proceed to cram into them for the next six years.
Apologies if the thoughts in today’s column are a little scattered. I feel pretty strongly about education, and I really ought to sit down some time when I have a lot of free time and put all of my thoughts together sensibly. But that may be a long time from now, and in the mean time I thought I would share a little.