You can’t teach sports unless you have a gym. And it’s the same idea for the 21st-century skills we want to teach kids: innovation, creativity, critical thinking, deep understanding of science and technology. If you don’t have a place to teach these skills, you can’t really do a good job.
You can’t teach those skills in a classroom with 40 chairs and a blackboard. That’s just not how scientists work; that’s not how technologists work. It’s not a good way to teach those skills.
In the same way that we can’t assess these skills with a traditional paper and pencil test, you can’t test if someone can swim well by giving them a multiple choice test.
Photos: Kids experiment in FabLabs — spaces in schools designed for project-based STEM learning (via FabLab@School and TEDxManhattanBeach)
Paulo Blikstein is head of the FabLab@School program, an extension of Stanford University’s Transformative Learning Technologies Lab. FabLab@School aims to install “low-cost digital workshop[s] equipped with laser-cutters, routers, 3D scanners, 3D milling machines, and programming tools” specially-designed for children in schools across the world, so that children will be able to learn by doing, not just hearing.
At TEDxManhattanBeach, Paulo spoke about the project, and the importance of DIY in education. From his talk, “A school for makers”:
In a world where we are surrounded by technology — technology shapes the world around us — [most of our students] know nothing about how those things work.
We dissemble something — we don’t know what’s inside. We look around — we don’t know how things work. It’s all magical. And it’s amazing that school is not doing more to teach us about how to understand science, how to understand technology, how to understand what’s around us.
…You can’t teach sports unless you have a gym. And it’s the same idea for the 21st-century skills we want to teach kids: innovation, creativity, critical thinking, deep understanding of science and technology. If you don’t have a place to teach these skills, you can’t really do a good job.
[So we build labs with] 3D printers, laser cutters, robotics, science equipment, sensors, all sorts of construction and science materials for kids to build projects, build inventions…
[A student] spent six months [in one of our labs] building [an invention of her own design.] Here, I don’t want to talk much about the technological skills that she acquired, but how this changed the way she looked at the world — not looking at technology as something magical, but looking at technology and science as a tool to improve the lives of others.
For more information on FabLabs and STEM education, watch Paulo’s entire talk below:
Former textbook writer and TEDxBeaconStreet speaker Tyler DeWitt has ideas on how we should teach science — and they’re a lot different from how most do it now. During his first year teaching high school science, a moment came during a lesson on bacteria and viruses that made him realize that what he was asking his students to read wasn’t really teaching them science at all.
“The reading sucked,” said a student. “You know what, I don’t mean that it sucks. It means that I didn’t understand a word of it. It’s boring. Um, who cares, and it sucks.”
So — he taught his students the lesson in the way he’d like to be taught — as a story — and in his TEDxBeaconStreet talk, “Hey science teachers — make it fun,” Tyler breaks down how stories, images, and demonstrations can make science not only more accessible to kids, but more memorable for everyone.
From his talk:
The language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize [the story of viruses and how they attack], we could start by saying something like, “These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.”
The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: “Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium.” That’s great, perfect for 13 year olds…You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it’s like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can’t just tell a story….Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have to convince our audience that what we’re talking about matters…
I’m currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we’re trying to teach 13 year olds. If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that’s not going to ruin their chances of success in science. But if a young learner can’t understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success.
When he’s not teaching, Tyler makes YouTube explaining scientific concepts in a way that won’t put you to sleep.
To watch his videos, click here, and don’t miss his TEDxBeaconStreet talk, which you can watch in its entirety on TED.com.
(Photos: Tyler’s cartoon science lesson)
The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.
They are talking about things they didn’t see. It’s amazing. It’s a wonderful moment…It calls for celebration. For example, a kid says, “Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home.” Then a typical mom responds, “Stop that nonsense.” Now, an ideal parent is someone who responds like this: “Really? An alien, huh? What did it look like? Did it say anything? Where did you meet it?” “Um, in front of the supermarket.”
When you have a conversation like this, the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started. Soon, a story develops. Of course this is an infantile story, but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does. In essence, they are not different … a novel, basically, is writing one sentence, then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence. And you continue to make connections.
Take a look at this sentence: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Yes, it’s the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka’s work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature. Kafka did not show his work to his father. He was not on good terms with his father. On his own, he wrote these sentences. Had he shown his father, “My boy has finally lost it,” he would’ve thought.
And that’s right. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence, which is not much different from what a kid does. A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller. Kids do art.
—Novelist Young-ha Kim in his TEDxSeoul talk, “Be an artist, right now!”
