GELFAND’S WORLD-The latest buzz word is STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. It's getting parroted by every manner of political opportunist, half baked economist, and sociologist. I've written previously about how adults who don't know much about either STEM or teaching have been trying to interest children in developing an interest in the technical subjects. It's kind of the Revenge of the Nerds without the revenge, just a superficial glorification of everything that involves numbers, either binary or decimal.
Last weekend, there was a highly publicized show down in the harbor area, supposedly designed to interest today's youth in science and technology. The attempt was organized by a group known as Two Bit Circus and was called the STEAM Carnival. STEAM stands for everything in STEM plus art.
The STEAM event was flogged all over town, even to the point that the office of one elected official gave out free passes to military offspring. The event itself was pretty much a disappointment, but the effort can perhaps provide us a few insights about how better to get kids interested in technical matters.
One of the first things you would have discovered upon planning to go to STEAM was the price, which came to $25 for adults and $20 for children for a one day admission. The other price that jumped out at me was the charge for parking, which was $20 at the adjoining lot. Ordinarily, there is no charge for parking there. The attendant told me that I could park elsewhere for $8. I reversed gear and parked across the street in the free lot. The attendant apparently forgot to mention that the harbor has lots of free parking.
Still, admission was free for children aged 6 and under. This may have explained the large number of young kids I saw at the STEAM. They seemed to be having a great time, playing with balls and cutting up cardboard boxes and watching jugglers. There was also a rope climbing act which seemed like it belonged to Circus Circus more than to science education, but it did have a youthful following.
I should insert a little disclosure here. I've been a judge at the California State Science Fair for more than 2 decades, and I've done some science teaching in my time. I've also done a little math tutoring for the children of various friends, so I think I have a feel for how to reach students in the middle school and high school range.
I also think science and math can be interesting, provided you present it at an age-appropriate level and work to find the good parts, the communicable insights that result in that light bulb going on over the student's head.
The problem I had with the STEAM show is the same problem I had with a previous STEM show I reviewed back during Navy Week. There was precious little about science in it. This seems to be a chronic problem in the way science is misrepresented to children of all ages nowadays.
In this case, there were lots of demonstrations of games, including electronic versions of whack-a-mole, the chance to pilot a toy helicopter using a game console, and the chance to interact with a couple of updated versions of the musical instrument known as the theremin. One moderately interesting exhibit involved a tiny nozzle that shot forth drops of water (45 per second, it was explained to me) and caused them to visually freeze by illuminating them with a stroboscopic light. This sort of thing is always fun to play with, but as in the other games and toys, it didn't really seem to teach anything useful about science. I think that you can use strobe lights and falling objects to communicate something about science or engineering, or possibly even about math, but the exhibit didn't deliver on any of those.
We did get a brief comment about how the exhibit was about persistence of vision. Maybe so, but there was no explanation that I heard about what persistence of vision actually is, nor why falling drops appear to stand still when illuminated with a strobe light. (Hint: the drop that appears to be standing still instead of falling is actually the sum of lots of drops, each one intersecting the strobe light in the same place -- that's because the operator adjusts the frequency of the strobe to make this happen.)
Again, I don't want to sound overly critical here, but I have to mention that no less a mind than Richard Feynman told a story in one of his books about noticing the following: When you turn on a tap, the stream of water gets thinner as it falls. Feyneman mentions that he figured this problem out fairly quickly and went on to other thoughts. I think that inviting kids to think about the shape of falling water and using it to talk about gravity and about surface tension would have been a much better teaching opportunity. For the older students, there is a nifty mathematical question about the shape of the descending stream.
So we had small children pushing on buttons to turn out lights, tossing balls through hoops, and basically engaging in digitalized versions of playground games. In brief, there was a room full of fun for the 6 and under crowd, and food trucks and beer for the adults.
There were a couple or three places that made some attempt to bring science or math insight to the children, although they were almost hidden in the back of one room. One involved teaching a little about the mathematics of whole numbers to young children using a card game. That struck me as potentially useful and probably fun. The representative, a former classroom teacher (and also U.S. Marine) introduced me to the product. At another table, a young man showed me how his company had adapted a computer board to control various motors and sliders, and better yet, to be able to use a cell phone screen to program the actions. This did not lead to added insight into how such things work, but if you ever took a class in digital logic design, it was what we would call elegant.
There was also a small area off in one corner dedicated to lectures, ostensibly about science. Although this was closest in intent to what STEAM should have been about, I found it to be the biggest disappointment of all. Perhaps I missed some great talk at some other time, but of the two I watched, there was little of distinction. One lecture involved the idea of nanotechnology. The presenter defined the concept nicely enough (we're talking about things less than 100 nanometers across, where a nanometer is the billionth part of a meter). He then gave a rapid run through of various commercial applications, including the use of small particles derived from silicon to coat things and make them waterproof. Funny thing, we used a similar technology to coat glassware back when I was in grad school in the late Pleistocene. But some company is making the particles smaller, so that's STEAM. It was obvious that the children watching the lecture weren't getting any sort of science appreciation out of this talk. Rather, it was the approach I refer to as science presented as magic.
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The other lecture I saw was supposedly about chemistry. The lecturer showed how vinegar and baking soda can react to give off bubbles. She then showed how you could use this technology to cause a balloon to inflate. She talked about how you can use chemistry to inflate things and to blow things up, to the obvious interest of the 9 and younger crowd. She actually got the chemistry wrong, as she explained that the reaction gives off oxygen gas, rather than the correct answer, which would be carbon dioxide.
The other comment I have might seem a bit pedantic, but I've taught chemistry and biochemistry labs, and student safety is always your first priority. When you do reactions that involve flames, or things that give off gases, you are supposed to wear proper protective equipment. That includes eye protection. So here we had somebody talking about using chemistry to blow things up and demonstrating a reaction that gave off an expanding frothy output, and she didn't wear goggles, much less a lab coat. She also showed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, added some to some salt of potassium, meanwhile explaining to the kids that she had never done this experiment and didn't know how it would turn out. Still no goggles or lab coat, and not even a pair of gloves. I hope that none of those kids starts playing with hydrogen peroxide without eye protection, as even the common 3% variety that you can buy in the store can irritate the eyes. All of this is readily available online by looking up the material safety data sheet, also known as the msds.
During the middle of the lecture on nanotechnology, the lecturer was completely drowned out by some incredibly loud guitar music. This was coming from the stage area at the front of the room. I think it was indicative of the internal conflict between the carnival background of the organizers and the supposed purpose of the event, which was to interest kids in STEAM. When the noise finally cooled down, I spoke to one of the event leaders, who was very enthusiastic and explained that the event was sponsored and run by people who are very passionate about the subject. The level of passion might have been high, but it seemed to be concentrated at the level of carnival acts rather than the stimulation of deep thought. I would like to suggest that the passion be tempered with critical thinking in the future.
The STEAM Carnival advertised a long list of impressive sponsors, including IBM. This was kind of a blast from the past, because what the show actually resembled was the old Comdex computer conventions that used to be held in Las Vegas. Only this one, instead of introducing the latest thing in full color monitors or the newest high speed modem, was aimed at the 6 to 9 year old cohort. We got computer games without the computers being featured, and this being San Pedro, there were no slot machines in evidence. Like Comdex, this event featured a lot of advertising by the aforementioned IBM, more advertising from a company called Autodesk, and several offers to train your child (or maybe even you) in beginning level computer programming. This was all wrapped up in the argument -- now having become a piece of propagandistic formalism -- that there will be lots of jobs in the digital sector for the next generation.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected].)
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CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 87
Pub: Oct 28, 2014
