Written in March, 2018 for the Brisbane World Science Festival
Children are born with a natural want to learn, which is why this is the best time to start talking science, said experts at Brisbane’s 2018 World Science Festival.
Karri Nelder, from the University of Queensland’s Early Cognitive Development Centre (ECDC), explained that children are born curious and the process of science helps them make sense of the world.
“The skills of critical or independent thinking that science encourages are invaluable for children, because they provide the means to pose questions and answer them across any facet of life,” Ms Nelder said.
She explained young children’s brains are more ‘flexible’ or ‘plastic’, meaning their brains build with each new piece of information they receive, and science helps them ask why something happened, work out the reasoning and test their theories.
“We like to show children that science is in everything and provide them with practical demonstrations of that fact,” Ms Nelder said.
“By encouraging young children to engage in science, we can help foster and hone that instinctive curiosity into specialised skills of thinking and appraisal.”
The ECDC was at the Queensland Museum this weekend as part of the World Science Festival, running live experiments and demonstrations for young children and their parents.
“By giving children access to real scientists, and allowing them to engage in tasks with them, we can expose children to the methods of question asking and critical thinking in a practical and engaging way,” Ms Nelder said.
“Our experiments are set up as games and puzzles that children are motivated to solve, and this drives them to ask their own questions about what they experience - why did that effect occur, what made it happen, how could I change it?”
Dr Chris Ferrie, author of Quantum Physics for Babies, agreed that toddlers and children are born with inherent desires to learn, which is why he wrote his children’s-books.
“I think all children are scientists; they explore and they develop and perform experiments on their own,” Dr Ferrie said.
“I think as adults we kind of shield them from the world and then the conversation turns into one about when we should introduce science but really we’re re-introducing it.”
The father of four said instead of asking ourselves when to teach children science, we should help them discover science from any age.
“I think that we should just foster their curiosity and give them lots of variety and opportunities to explore it.”
Dr Ferrie, who is also a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney and Centre for Quantum Software and Information, believes science is vital for everyone.
“I think that in order to a have a well-functioning society everyone should have a certain level of understanding in science because it forms the basis of all knowledge, technology and pretty much all of our lives now,” he said.
Natalee-Jewel Kirby and her three-year-old son, Robert-Ulysses, have all of Dr Ferrie’s children’s-books.
“They’ve definitely sparked an interest in him [Robert-Ulysses],” Ms Kirby said.
“He can’t read but he certainly recognises the imagery and some of the words… we feel like he’s getting them.”
Ms Kirby said she did not have a very good education in the sciences, but thinks they are important.
She hopes to gives her son the learning she did not have and encourage him to become involved in STEM in the future.
“He is creative as well but I’m of the mind that you don’t have to be left or right sided mind, you can be either and both,” Ms Kirby said.
“We just want to give him every opportunity.”
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