Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) 1

Science, technology, and mathematics are not all about test-tubes and equations. Great scientists and mathematicians are able above all to think scientifically and mathematically; in other words, they are able to perceive patterns and relationships and to pose deep questions about what they see. In the end, being a scientist or a mathematician is simply about observing experience and then thinking about it. To a perceptive young person, quantitative and causal relationships will begin to emerge where least expected, and the youngster who is inclined to apply even more thought to these relationships is on the path to truly thinking like a scientist.

The suggestions in the SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATH section are designed to foster scientific and mathematical approaches to otherwise ordinary day-to-day experience. Some require more rigorous or disciplined action—record-keeping, for example—but all are designed for the simple purpose of helping the young person see common phenomena in new, more insightful ways.

STEM 1. Learn to identify five (or ten) different types of trees.
In a world in which the study of biology in schools is largely confined to the molecular and cellular level, the old-fashioned study of nature by observation and classification is something of a lost art. Nonetheless, many students are interested in various kinds of field biology, and the ability to recognize different species and families is an important skill to acquire.

Even if the youngster may not be heading toward graduate study in biology, it is both useful and satisfying to be able to recognize different elements of one’s environment. In most locales the variety of trees is still linked to an older variety of purpose: some trees were planted for shade, others for the timber or firewood they produced, still others for their ornamental qualities. In a few places the tree population is as it was prior to the development of the land by settlers; cottonwoods and willow mark watercourses, or the giants in virgin forest are preserved as relics of natural history. The successive growth of particular species marks the historical sequence by which nature reclaims cleared land.

Good field guides to the study of trees (dendrology) abound, and any online bookstore and many online "tree" sites should be able to provide choice. The better ones will provide not just pictures and names but also explanation and history, perhaps explaining the suitability of its wood, seeds, sap, or bark for uses in an earlier time. The guide might also refer to some of the more urgent issues confronting modern tree populations—blights and insects whose spread has been made possible by human agency, or invasive non-native species that thrive opportunistically in ecological niches once occupied by other species that they have in effect driven out. Rather than representing a constant in nature, trees have life cycles and crises, and the more one can learn about this, the more effective a steward the thinking youngster will be.

(ALSO: Sports, Fitness, and the Great Outdoors)

STEM 2. Learn to identify at least three (or five, or ten) constellations. Be able to identify the North Star. Learn to spot a couple of planets.
A knowledge of the heavens has been the sign of a learned person in many cultures, and for an investment of relatively little time in generally pleasant circumstances a young person can gain a surprising degree of knowledge of astronomy. Although the makeup of constellations may seem obscure to some observers, familiarity with the unchanging layout of the stars can eventually bring an understanding of the patterns that our forebears once regarded as common lore. At various times of the year a number of planets are prominent in the night sky during the normal waking hours of most children, and the seasonal procession of constellations gives the knowing looker yet another way of measuring, and pondering, the passage of time.

There are a number of good astronomical maps and sites on the internet, as are computer programs and apps for mobile devices that simulate in detail and with labels the night sky at any time of day from any location.  There are also any number of excellent guidebooks and online sites dedicated to helping young observers learn about stars and planets, and several magazines—Astronomy and Sky & Telescope, in particular—carry detailed maps of each month’s night sky, including the phases of the moon and the appearance of planets and other non-stellar objects. A great, simple gadget is a planisphere, an adjustable star chart usually made of cardboard and available online or at many science museum gift shops—even educational toy stores.

There are telescopes available that can be programmed to aim themselves at specific astronomical targets, but these, though the prices are coming down, still run into the many hundreds of dollars for the most basic models. Of course, a mere ability to spout the names of a few constellations, and even to spot planets, is only the very beginning of a true knowledge of modern astronomy. Many of the better star guides are also good basic textbooks in the nature of the universe, with discussions of the many types of stars, galaxies, and nebulae and in-depth features on planets, asteroids, and comets. Knowing where the Pleiades are relative to the moon will no longer make one a sage, but being able to understand the patterns, forces, and elements of the universe is still a sign of an essential intellectual engagement with the world around one.

(ALSO: Sports, Fitness, and the Great Outdoors)

STEM 3. Choose some object that you use or some food that you eat regularly. Research and then write the story of how that object or food was produced—everything from raw materials to processing to transportation to marketing. How many countries or states are involved in your story? Who makes the most money in the process—the people at the raw-material end or the marketing end, or someone in between?
We take for granted almost everything we eat and consume, with few products or services attracting even a small amount of our thought as to their origins or the process by which they were made or brought to us. This activity aims to help the young person explore the complexity of the modern consumer economy.

A powerful fact of economic life is that we are becoming more and more distant, physically and psychically, from means of production. Our lives as consumers are mediated less by an understanding of how things come to be than by the engines of marketing and advertising, which would have us believe that most of what we consume has been created, sui generis, at the stores from which we buy. Famously, many of our consumer goods are produced “offshore,” and diners in most parts of the country sit down to eat food that has traveled hundreds or thousands of miles from where it was grown or even processed.

Because many companies are loath to have us know how highly processed our food is or the conditions under which our clothing or electronic goods are made, this activity will actually require some fairly serious sleuthing. A can of green beans, for example, involves 1) the beans, which were grown somewhere; 2) a can, which was made somewhere from steel processed somewhere; 3) the canning process, which takes place somewhere; 4) the label, made of paper from somewhere and printed somewhere; 5) transportation to a warehouse somewhere, and then a market; and 6) all the mechanisms involved in advertising and marketing the product. Along the way there are government inspectors, fertilizers and pesticides used on the bean fields, energy consumed by tractors, factories, and trucks, and some master hand directing the entire process from “corporate headquarters.” The challenge is to find the details of each step; imagine the challenge in doing the same for a laptop computer, an automobile, or even the DVD of a favorite film.

Library and internet research will only accomplish so much in this activity, especially if the youngster starts with a very specific product in mind. But persistence will pay off, even though there will be blank spots in research and even the possibility of experiencing some corporate stonewalling; after all, there are business secrets involved in any process, as well.

The truly ambitious student might want to do a comparative study involving the same product today and fifty years ago. The results might be revelatory as to the degree to which globalization has affected every aspect of our lives.

(ALSO: Business and Entrepreneurship; The World and Its Cultures)

STEM 4. Acquire some kind of magnifying glass or pocket microscope and look at snowflakes, sand, dirt, or anything else that you think might be kind of interesting. Your food might be kind of an interesting place to start.
When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek “discovered” the miracle of optical magnification in the 17th century, he opened up an unseen world. Even relatively low degrees of magnification—ten to twenty times normal size, referred to as “power” and abbreviated as 10x to 20x—can reveal extraordinary and wholly unexpected details in the most common objects. Almost any piece of food, for instance, takes on a whole new appearance under magnification (and perhaps should not be the first subject of a squeamish eater’s attentions in this activity), and the surface of one’s own skin or even a hair has amazing facets and features. Even a dollar bill has secrets that unfold only to the viewer whose vision is aided by a strong lens.

A simple magnifying glass should be easy to find; a sewing supply store or a department store should offer a choice. For a few dollars more many hobby stores have specialized magnifiers, some with battery illumination, and specialty electronics and scientific supply stores have a variety of small scopes of 30 power or more that can be used to obtain stunning close-up views of grains of salt (whose cubical crystalline structure is clearly visible) or sand—or the anatomical details of a dead insect.

The next level of interest and investment in this activity involves the acquisition of a microscope. As with most optical technology, quality is proportional to cost, but it may be possible to obtain the use of a school microscope or a ‘scope belonging to an individual. The quality of the lenses, the strength of the lenses, and the source of illumination can vary dramatically, and it might be well for the novice microscope user to start by using prepared slides (of blood cells, fungal spores, dust, plant cells, to give some common examples) under the direction of a knowledgeable elder. Too much magnification can actually be a distraction, as the level of detail is so great that a sense of what is being viewed is utterly lost.

Wanting to see the tiny “essence” of things can become something of a compulsion, once the discovery is made that even smooth objects are in fact creviced and canyoned or that a drop of pond water can contain a myriad of life-forms. All such activity serves to train the observer in a kind of critical thought, to look beyond surfaces and to regard apparent clarity with some skepticism. Leeuwenhoek’s gift to the world can provide enormous intellectual sustenance for a curious youngster.

(ALSO: Sports, Fitness, and the Great Outdoors)

STEM 5. Navigate! Next time you take a trip—even a short car ride with friends or family when it is safe to do so—take over the map-reading and route-selection duties. Find the most detailed maps you can, and learn to read them carefully and accurately.
Map-reading is an essential literacy skill that adults (including, alas, many teachers) assume that children have learned through osmosis. Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and so even map-illiterate-proof resources like Google Maps and in-car GPS navigation systems are not always enough to keep people from becoming lost.

In the United Kingdom, home of the superb Ordnance Survey maps that can be found in many households, map-reading is something of a fetish, and excellent school geography curricula ensure that few British people are ever geographically lost, at least for long. Although American USGS topographic maps are of excellent quality, they are not always useful for just “getting around,” and their delicious intricacies are seldom taught in school. Instead, Americans rely on inconsistently drawn and keyed road maps that are seldom of a scale to be truly informative; increasingly, they rely on GPS readouts that concentrate only on the route and the destination, utterly ignoring terrain, settlements, places of interest, and other features that can enrich map-reading and fuel curiosity.

Nonetheless, North American children can become excellent readers of maps, and the household that takes the time to preface journeys of any length with a review of the route will be modeling the idea of using maps as a resource as well as instructing children in their use. At some point the child can be instructed to do the route-planning on his or her own, and there will be some pride of accomplishment when the destination is reached without incident. It would be equally fruitful and fun to spend some time looking at an especially detailed, high-quality map—a government topo, perhaps, or a navigational chart—of a place with special meaning to the child. Landmarks and landforms, routes and settlements, all these have been determined by and/or have determined how a place looks and feels to those who go there and live there, and to a skilled map-reader a two-dimensional representation can be as informative and evocative as a photograph or even an actual visit.

For families who share an excitement about places and maps, there is also the potential thrill of taking a Blue Highways trip, in the spirit of author William Least Heat-Moon’s extraordinary 1982 narrative of that title recounting his journeys off the interstates on state and local roads often portrayed in blue on old road maps.

(ALSO: The World and Its Cultures)

STEM 6. Think of some silly—or important, even—task that you have to do and then build a “machine” out of junk and duct tape (or other cheap and easy-to-find materials) that performs the task. You can decide to make the machine beautiful and well-crafted, or you can decide to make it utterly ridiculous—the more duct tape, the better!
The cartoonist Rube Goldberg was famous for designing “machines” of absurd complexity that accomplished everyday tasks, and today there is a rich tradition in both engineering and design in using unlikely materials and over-engineering to create simple machines—usually in fact a combination of the classical simple machines (inclined plane, wheel and axle, pulley, wedge, screw, and lever)—to do things that are either necessary and useful or in fact totally useless.

No material has lent itself more to the uses of amateur inventors and engineers than duct tape, the ubiquitous silver-gray fabric-based tape that seems to stick to everything, especially itself, and that has famously been reported to have been used to perform emergency repairs on everything from shoes to airplanes. A pair of good scissors, some sacrificial cardboard boxes and a few sticks of wood are all the raw materials a young engineer might need to create almost anything; if other materials are also at hand, even Rube Goldberg’s creations might only be a starting point.

This is the unlikely time to introduce to the youngster the concept of scientific elegance. Some engineers are naturally tidy in their work and have an inborn sense to design that makes everything they produce look somehow elegant—simple, clean-lined, neatly made. Elegant solutions in science, engineering, and mathematics combine simplicity and grace, without extraneous elements, and the quest for elegance in an activity like this reduces the Rube Goldberg aspects to a bare minimum.

On the other hand, there is an exuberance in recognizing that anything made primarily of scrap and duct tape is in itself likely to be an assemblage of casually combined and inelegantly put together pieces, and that therefore a certain amount of extraneity is to be welcomed and even sought. Why not make the thing as baroque as possible, with added elements that have nothing to do with function but add whimsy to the form? If the object reminds one a bit of a rabbit, why not add long ears, whiskers, and a cotton tail?

This activity is about invention, but above all it is about allowing imagination and inclination to run a little wild. Elegant or not, the duct tape invention is part of great way to explore how things work and how they go together—learning a bit of physics and industrial design along the way.

(ALSO: The Arts and Creative Expression)