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Sir Harold Kroto

To open our second season, we talked with Sir Harold Kroto. Kroto won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 (along with Curl and Smalley) for the discovery of fullerenes. He talks to us about a loss of hands-on experiences in our world, how to reform science education, and offers a new resource for science (and other) educators.

Links:

• Sir Harold Kroto, Frances Eppes Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, FSU
• Harry Kroto’s Personal Website
• Autobiography of Sir Harold Kroto from Nobel Foundation
• Wikipedia entry of Sir Harold Kroto
• Sir Harold Kroto, FRS
• VEGA Science Trust
• GEOSET
• MAKE Magazine

This episode is sponsored by Frey Scientific

Preview from the Show:

Kroto: I think it’s clear that science education is not in great shape. If we look at the way in which the number of kids going in to science has not increased sufficiently, and we have massive technical problems to solve for survival and sustainability, and so we have to use all the tools at our disposal. And the new one, the internet, which has hardly started, and it seems to me that one way of using it effectively, would be to create a global cache of educational materials that teachers anywhere in the world can actually download.

Kroto: Our world is now full of technology which is almost impossible to get your hands on, or if you want to understand it, it’s very difficult for young kids to understand it…. I think people haven’t fully appreciated that my generation, and generations before, learned how the world worked by breaking it up and taking it to pieces and trying to put it back together again.

Dale: What advice do you have for [science teachers] to reform, or jumpstart science education?

Kroto: Well, it’s a massive problem, because it’s not just the teachers, it’s what the kids do themselves. I don’t know how to solve it really, because the world in which I was immersed was the world in which I was immersed, and it was a hands-on one. When the telephone didn’t work, I went inside it – and the bell wasn’t running or something…. But now if the television set doesn’t work – it’s obsolete. That presents a massive problem for the science teacher, and engineering and technology teachers. It needs really development of hands-on skills. And the problem is that modern kids are so subjected to immediate gratification, they don’t have the patience to go through rigmarole that I did.

Kroto: We’re now in a highly technical world, with many people in influential positions - in politics, in law, in journalism – who know nothing whatsoever about science. And yet, they’re making decisions on science, they’re talking about science, they don’t understand science. All they know about science is what is the use of it? They are not interested in the culture itself. They don’t go to a poet and ask “what’s the use of your poetry?” They don’t go to a writer and ask “what’s the use of it?” They can see, because they’re used to that culture, and see the essence of Shakespeare, or whatever the language. In our case, on average, people who are non-scientists just look at the scientific progression as a bunch of people who produce some useful technology. But they don’t think of us as a culture, which is what we are. And in fact, I would say, one of the most important cultures, because we are based on a very important philosophy, which is doubt, and to question everything, and to not accept dogma unjustified by experiment.

Brian: You are actually starting a new tool that is going to try to help teachers get a little bit firmer foundation on what they’re doing, and give them some resources. Could you tell us a little bit about that before you go?

Kroto: The new technology out there allows us to see a person teaching, together with the teaching material. And so what we are doing, in Florida State, is setting up what we call GEOSET – Global Education Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology. And math as well, and other things… so it’s not just restricted to the sciences. There are two screens, one with the video, so it’s like YouTube, and the second screen is almost like Wikipedia, but it’s downloadable. In fact, PowerPoint is what most presenters use.

Direct download: LOL17.mp3

Senator McCain answered 14 of today’s most difficult questions on science and technology.  Visit the SEA website to see McCain’s full responses.

Senator Barack Obama has already submitted his responses.

Now you can directly compare the two major presidential candidates on science, technology, health and related issues. [Link]

As the 2007-2008 school year was coming to a close, I came across an article written in the New York Times by physicist Dr. Brian Greene. With graduation just days away, final grades to enter and textbooks to collect, I skimmed through the article and went back to closing out the school year. Yet, I could not get the points in Dr. Greene’s article out of my head. All summer long, it kept me thinking about how I teach science.

Dr. Greene’s article, Put a Little Science in Your Life, emphasized the importance of making time in your science lessons to discuss the big questions. He argued that topics like the formation of the universe or orgins of life take a back seat because we are too focused on working our way through our standards-driven curriculum. Dr. Greene points out that science teachers are shackled to a sequence of topics laid out in our curriculum which leaves no room for discussions about cutting-edge experiments and discoveries that are happening right now.

Dr. Greene wrote:

We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.

As a physics teacher, I start each year teaching motion, then forces and so on. Almost every concept in our physics curriculum was nailed down over 400 years ago. But Dr. Greene’s article got me thinking- what about the physics that is being investigated today? Modern physics is full of extraordinary stories. It deserves to be showcased with more than a few videos and a couple Einstein activities scattered throughout the year.

My school as a model of the LHC

So now I’ve entered the 2008-2009 school year with a new goal- to weave current, cutting-edge science into my lessons. Fortunately, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went online early this morning. To mark the event, my students converted our school’s third floor into a model of the new accelerator (it helps that I teach in a round school). We strung yarn around our circular hallway to represent the two beams. Students hung posters along the hallway that described things like quarks, string theory and the Big Bang. Other students put up posters where the yarn beams cross to describe the experiments that are taking place in our model of the LHC.

This year I still plan to teach motion and forces, but my examples won’t be just about cars, arrows or balls. I hope to throw in a proton or muon from time to time too.