Seed Media Group: Blog
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 • New • by Eva Wisten • #
Science on the playground
Jane Clark Chermayeff & Associates (JCC&A), a New York-based concept- and exhibition design firm, recently launched PlayLab - an initiative to teach science on the playground.
The first PlayLab product is Play Cards, a stack of cards that talks about the science behind the things you experience on the playground: bumping into a friend while running, stepping in a puddle or dropping your ice cream. By explaining easy concepts and posing questions, the Play Cards encourage children to pay attention to the world around them. We were thrilled about the invitation to write an introductory essay.
Here’s what Adam, Seed’s founder, wrote.
It started with my 70-year old neighbor. I was five or six, and Dr. Kato and his wife lived next door to us, our backyards touched. There was something about him that naturally encouraged naïve curiosities. Everything was endlessly interesting. I wanted to know how everything worked: the sky, his beanstalks. Dr. Kato seemed to possess answers to all my questions and this, naturally, would just beget more questions.
For my first experiment I folded paper into airplanes and watched them fly (or not). My second experiment involved growing rotifers in petri dishes in my lab (aka our kitchen) and determining whether I could extend their lives. The fourth experiment I carried out required a microscope, some chicken hearts, and a glass homogenizer.
I graduated out of the kitchen and into a real lab eventually, and spent endless nights and weekends and holidays there. I got a better microscope. And my experiments soon meant that I could watch life happen, I could – in vivid fluorescents – see a magical microscopic world revealed. Dazzling patterns and shapes and colors. I could see what few people get to see.
It is an amazing thing to know something. And for a brief moment, to feel like you’ve reached some essential truth about life perhaps, or the universe. Dr. Kato once told me that science, at its best, lets you peer under this tablecloth and catch a glimpse of nature’s secrets. It’s a unique and surpassingly good feeling.
I realize today that Dr. Kato’s greatest influence on me was not the scientific knowledge that he so generously passed on; it was his view of the world. It was the way he played music, discussed history, talked about the news. For him, science was more than a subject of study, it’s a lens through which we can look at the world and understand its complexities. It’s a way to think and to live.
It begins in a backyard, a playground, anywhere ants march or a leaf wafts to the ground, anyplace can be the place to observe and feel the sheer beauty of the stuff that surrounds us. A child who gravitates to such investigations will have endless opportunities to play, see, learn, and grow passionate about the state of the world.