Should schools continue the rituals of science ?

Almost all schools continue with great religiosity the laboratory excersies developed in the Victorian area. Are they really needed in an era when almost every kid carries a lab ? . Unfortunately that lab is currently better known for its disruptive abilities and required to be switched off in many schools.

The rituals of a new religion

We are happy to forget the bitter early history of science particularly its bitter battle against religion in the Western world. Scientist were persecuted. They had to prove their new found faith.

Science demonstration was born — to convince the disbelievers. The Victorians did a great job at establishing the new faith, with mantras that we still memorize and their accompanying rituals. This had a dual purpose: to establish the new religion and to create practices that would be passed on to the generations to come as the “scientific method”.

Victorian-era science in a post-modern world

While there are clearly pockets of anti-science activism, as evidenced by the fury of the climate change debate, most kids are born into a world that is deeply ingrained with the scientific method.

We live in a time when science has become an article of faith. Is there a need for us to validate science in schools through routine laboratory practicals as our great, great grandparents would have done? Our challenge is to interest kids in science because they are bored. If we examine most laboratory practicals today, we find them to be routine and utterly predictable.

Students have no role other than to follow strict procedures, using old world tools, though now digitized now, are essentially unchanged the nineteenth century. Educational practices have moved on to some extent, but most school laboratory practices have not.

Educators are now faced with the challenge of interesting children born amidst a deluge of data, sensors & connectivity. Do we really want to teach them how to use a stopwatch? Do we want to teach them that things are predictable and that they obey without fail the law’s of science? Do we expect them to be more employable if they know how to use a stop watch? And do we think they will develop a love for science by doing routine scientific experiments? Are we not deluding ourselves here?

Little has changed in the way we teach

Although we see our era as one of massive change, perhaps this is how historians of education technologies will view our times:

“…books were being turned into e-books, blackboards were being turned into YouTube videos and lecture hall monologues were being turned into MOOCs — massive online open courses. And if you think about it, all we’re really doing here is taking the same content and the same format, and bringing it out to more students — but the teaching method is still more or less the same, no real innovation there.” — Michael Bodekaer

Few would have failed to notice the galactic changes in education caused by the internet. We face these changes by keeping what we do constant, but add tech tools to it, like the early days of the internet when existing practices were often simply replicated. For instance, most shop owners thought “Great! Now we can put our catalogues online ” and that is what they did.

STEM education, by and large, is still at that stage, missing out on the greater potential of ubiquitous new technologies.

What does the phone brings to the party?

Sensors. We make sense out of the world with our inborn ability to sense it. It took us a good many centuries to develop the ability to measure what we sense and a few more centuries to figure out how the things that we can measure relate to each other.

This was the magic of science — but that was many centuries ago. There is no magic in it any more or the need to inflict its rituals on our children. We should not be banning the use of the best sensor platform ever invented — their phones.

Using phones for lab experiments is not a new idea. There are quite a few efforts from far corners of the world including Bilbao Spain, Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Chiang Mai, Thailand, Santiago Chile , Uruguay and Bucharest, Romania.

Interestingly 88% of schools in Latin America do not have school labs. The academics of these remote places are making good use of smart phone capabilities. They are poised to potentially leapfrog over their better-resourced colleagues, who are still investing in out-of-date, expensive, specialized lab equipment such as data loggers, digital timers and the like.

There are also now blue tooth connectable sensors that will easily connect your smart phone to a whole range of sensors. SensorTags by TI and Node Sensors by Variable, Sensor Module by PocketLabs and Mantis open STEM platform by Hip Science to name a few. These devices will take phone use beyond physics into the domains of chemistry, biology, and geology.

But what could be the bigger change?

Fuelled by parental anxiety about future careers, lab modernization in many schools is now in full swing, often along the lines of “advanced” use of tools funded by “investment in STEM education” aligned with old world school practices.

Meanwhile, in a typical class of 20, at least 10,000 worth of fantastic lab equipment is on shut down mode. Each of those 20 students is likely to have a phone worth $500 in their pocket: that phone is a data logger, sensor platform, calculator, camera, display device, record keeper and a connected computer.

Phones are indeed better at doing what old world lab equipment can do. They come with a greater promise at the level of learning experience. Phones can completely alter the experience of learning STEM made boring by routines that are centuries old.

Phones may finally liberate the students from the clutches of routine and empower them to follow their own adventures. At the Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS), we have found that where students are-encouraged to design and carry out their own experiments, great learning happens.

The phone is a perfect medium for connecting learning to making. For instance, 3D printing opens up entirely new possibilities. Parts like software now become globally distributable. Students are able to design and create their own components with relative ease. 3D printing enables kids to create their own experiments.

At ASMS, our initiative in using phones (PhoneLabs), to unleash the ability to visualise phenomena such as acceleration had striking results. Phenomena that were previously explained in abstraction were now experienced through their own phone, through their own activities. All the students we surveyed felt that using phones was “a much better way of learning” physics than conventional methods.

It seems sensor technology connects students directly with understanding of physical phenomena: a connection that conventional physics teaching destroys through abstractions. The benefit of abstraction is that it provides a much higher level of understanding that the students can then apply across domains. But it is in this very abstraction that we lose them; because they do not see the connection to real life.

There is a real opportunity with sensor technologies to teach in-situ, to invert the lab, to make the lab the learning session, based on real world phenomena. As a result, students will never ask the question “So how is this related to life?” and forget physics when they leave the lab — because they take the phones home with them. In this way, the world becomes a lab and physics becomes real.

Ready for rapid adaptation?

There are now plenty of free, high-quality sensor apps in both Android and iPhones. Lab4U is a fine initiative led by Komal Dadlani based in Chile. An equally impressive initiative Tool Box Apps by Rebecca Vieyra and Chrystian comprises a suite of free apps and excellent lessons plans. Her “Turn Your Smartphone into a science laboratory” is certainly worth a read. A compressive set of lesson plans published by The European Platform for Science Teachers, gives us a clear indication that the use of phones in labs is well underway in Europe.

The first physics MOOCS Course using phones by Professor Joel Chevrier, Professor of l’Université Grenoble Alpes commenced in January this year. The American Association of Physics Teachers now has IPhysicsLabs focused on SmartPhone based physics teaching.

Most interesting of all is Google’s jump into this world through an app called Science Journal. Perhaps they realized that it is time to connect data collection, learning and recording in contemporary ways. Google’s timely and welcome entry will create massive impetus to change the game.

The phone is now a lab.