The Wonder that Drives the Science

So far, I've written about two people who have deeply impacted my understanding of the play/science connection. One of those mentors was my high school physics teacher. Another, Dr. Olga Jarret, my daughter's play/science mentor at the University of Georgia, recipient of the Defender of the Playful award, and who recently invited me to speak at the 2010 conference for The Association for the Study of Play.

I wanted to put both of them together in one post, to commemorate their contribution to my life, and, hopefully, to enlarge theirs to yours.

In my article describing Dr. Jarret's work, I quoted from one of her manuscripts:

Counting takes on new meaning when children count the spots on ladybugs to determine if they all have the same number...

(use) measuring sticks, thermometers, scales and timers (to) determine without guesswork who has he longest hair, how long a worm is when stretched out/scrunched up, how fast a pumpkin grows...." "see how many drops of water you can drip onto the face of a coin before it runs off. Then flip over the coin and try the other side."

And here, from my article Teaching Games, what I learned from Mr. Bush:

...we were about to start playing with our cloud chambers. Mr. Bush had already made one, and we were looking into it, watching these strange contrails zipping across the inside of the bowls, appearing like messages from the unknown.

Mr. Bush stopped us, then turned off the lights, opened the shades and closed the binds so that only a little daylight came into the room. We could see beams of light cross the ceiling, reflected from the windows of passing cars. We spent a couple minutes watching those familiar, yet suddenly strange patterns of light race across the ceiling. Mr. Bush, in a quiet voice, asked us if we could figure out what kinds of cars made those reflections. We laughed in shared puzzlement. And then we watched some more. I thought I recognized the shape of a Kaiser - because of its weird front window. But, of course, I couldn't really tell.

Then he added: "trying to figure out what car made that light is exactly like what scientists do when they try to understand what kind of particle made that trail in the cloud chamber." And then he was silent, letting us look at the light from the passing cars some more, wondering, experience the wonder that drives the science.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith