School Budget vote and Science fair
May 20th, 2008 ecoliToday was the school budget vote, held in my district’s elementary school. They also have the elementary school science fair at the same time as a way to get parents in to vote.
I remember participating in the science fairs in elementary school back in the day and I must say, though I wouldn’t trust my memory completely on this one, that the overall quality of the project has gone up considerably.
Of course, there were plenty of generic projects, like “do plants grow well in sunlight” and “how many popcorn kernals stay unpopped.” Some of them weren’t really experiments, but demonstrative ‘engineering’ type things, like using potatoes as a battery to turn on a light bulb. The silliest project was probably the one that compared the sinking rates of a rock and a piece of paper in water.
But there were definitely a lot of interesting ones. For example, testing the mass-independence of gravitational acceleration, conservation of proportions of salt content in marine water, and “at what temperature water freezes the fastest” (it was room temp).
All of these projects are independent of teacher, but with plenty of parental advising I’m sure. So, to see elementary school kids exploring relatively advanced scientific concepts is heartening. I even saw one experiment (effect of temperature on goldfish metabolic rate) that we did in a 200 level biology lab. There were probably around 500 poster boards and most of them where serious, if ‘elementary’ investigations.
To me, this means that, at least in my school, they are taking a serious approach to science. Not only teaching kids to learn principles, but teaching them how to think like scientists. Of course, parents probably helped on most if not all of the projects, but that’s in no way a bad thing. It just means that parents today are not ignorant about science. They want there children to learn science, and they have the capacity to help their children manage a scientific investigation.
Now, a few projects were lacking in the way they applied the scientific method, didn’t have the right controls, etc. But I think that’s a minor point, overall. Fostering a love for science early is the important thing; the details can come later. I’m feeling pretty confidant about the future of science right now.
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