Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

1.11.10 | During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.

“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”

And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”

The White House and the Jack D. Hidary Foundation hope to achieve that by connecting schools, teachers and students via a website (http://www.nationallabday.org) that identifies funding sources, scientists and other professionals who can help students with discovery-based science projects.

Teachers can post project descriptions on the National Lab Day website, along with specific needs, like an Acid Rain Lab that requires one scientist and one volunteer.  At the bottom of the request page is an “I Want to Help” button that puts interested scientists and community members in contact with the teacher. The site then matches scientists, engineers and other professionals with the requests.

The overall goal, Hidary says, is both simple and ambitious. National Lab Day encourages out-of-school tinkering, while bringing hands-on learning into the classroom and tying them together in a way that will create a generation of discoverers, problem solvers and innovators.

“Our aim is to start a movement and demonstrate that hands-on learning works,” he says. “We want to [create an environment] where every kid has access to hands-on learning on a regular basis and reengages with discovery.”

“Kids are much more engaged with hands-on learning than with textbook learning,” Hidary says, adding that when given an opportunity to create something themselves, “they don’t even realize that they are learning.”

Creating Critical Thinkers

According to Hidary, the desire to explore begins at a very early age: Kids scour beaches and backyards, examining what they find. But, those same pre-school “super discoverers” are turned into “cabbages” after several years of traditional science education.

Today, Hidary says, kids live in two different worlds. First there is the real world, where they play Wii, instant message, make their own websites and surf the web while watching television. Then, says Hidary, “they take a time machine called school, and go back to the 1940s, where we use textbooks, rulers and pencils.”

Hidary compares the traditional science lab practice of conducting experiments from a book, where students are asked to follow instructions that will yield expected and predictable results, to “Julia Child’s cooking school,”

“If you’re interested in training sous chefs, that’s fantastic, but if you’re more interested in having kids develop problem-solving skills, we’ve got to take a different approach.”

The need for a different approach is borne out by the fact that U.S. students have fallen dramatically behind students in other nations in math and science performance, and the United States invests less in hands-on science education than other countries.

“The results are clear. Score-wise. Test-wise. We are behind,” Hidary says.

Digital Science Labs

The Internet is also playing a role in reimagining the traditional science lab, since with digital labs schools are no longer constrained by local district science budgets. Hidary cites examples like the Bugscope, which allows teachers, classes and individual students to mail bugs to a lab at the University of Illinois and then view their samples online through an electron microscope under their own remote control. (For more examples, see Think Like a Mathematician, Save the World from Monsters).

In addition, Hidary says, project-based learning (and that which is done remotely via the web) is cheaper than traditional lab work.

According to Hidary, the remarkable access to information and technology available online, combined with unprecedented support from the White House, make this the right time to push hard for participatory learning. The end result may be a country of schoolchildren who like to tinker as much as he did.

The impact of this kind of learning, he says, goes far beyond STEM.

“It’s about real life,” he says, “about being presented with a problem, struggling against challenges and trying different methods to find a solution. Hands-on learning works. And that’s what we’re doing.”

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• Hands-on, participatory learning is the focus of this year’s HASTAC/MacArthur “Reimagining Learning” Digital Media and Learning Competition. This third annual open competition seeks innovators to design new digital media experiences to help young people interact, share, build, tinker and explore in new and innovative ways. This year’s contest, with awards totaling $2 million, focuses on science, technology, engineering and math for students.
• Spotlight dug deeper into participatory learning—what it is and how it promotes engaged students—in October.  For more examples of hands on learning read Classroom Quest: Virtual Space Brings Academic Content to Life. See also Spotlight’s article on SmallLab, an innovative digital tool to teach science and math.