Maximizing Progress: Young Scientist Centre ~ Kids Learning-by-Doing!
Sometimes experiments don’t work and you have to do them again and that’s very time consuming. But it’s vital to get a true understanding of the subject. These days it’s so easy to download a fact, but do you understand it? What I feel is that sometimes, when things are taught without true experimentation, students don’t understand it. And that needs to change. Children can do science at school, but they don’t necessarily learn what a real scientist is — planning an experiment, needing to repeat things, having a clear hypothesis and testing it.
This is the hardest part of becoming a scientist, and has made me (and many of my classmates) question why we wanted to do this in the first place. Failing at something every day for years is terrible, even if the cumulative effect is a true understanding of a subject and maybe even the discovery of something totally new. I wonder if I had learned about how failure is so closely linked to experimental science as a child in my science classes would I be better able to deal with it now, or would I have chosen another path entirely?
I also think that experimental failure has interesting implications for synthetic biology, but that will have to wait for another post…
