SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING & MATHEMATICS (STEM) 2

STEM 7. Observe something and keep a record on a daily basis—your weight, the temperature at breakfast, the number of cars parked on your block at a particular time of day, the number of times your teacher says a particular word over a two-week period…. Make a graph and look for patterns.
If scientific genius is “ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration,” as Thomas Edison said, much of the sweat equity in progress has come from careful, regular observation and record-keeping. Extraordinarily, it is the highly disciplined management and analysis of disease records, rather than lab work with microorganisms, that has led to the understanding of the causes of many epidemic diseases, and the laws of planetary motion are a product of the detailed recording of planetary positions by Tycho Brahe; Kepler and Newton drew upon such records to derive mathematical principles, and Newton applied these principles to the study of gravity.

Modern science depends on detailed quantitative record-keeping, and much of the application of computers in science is in the service of developing statistical models. The young scientist who sets about the precise recording of observed data is, therefore, participating in a long and fundamental scientific tradition.

The fun of this activity, of course, is to begin to discern patterns. If the recorder makes a point of recording several possibly related kinds of data—temperature and barometric pressure, say, or the total number of goals scored in each game each day in a professional ice hockey league and the number of spectators in each arena—interesting correlations may appear. The task of the scientist, of course, is to determine whether these correlations are in fact the result of some natural or psychological forces or merely coincidence. The number of fish caught by Aunt Minnie each day may or may not have anything to do with what Aunt Minnie had for breakfast, but careful observation of these two phenomena might yield significant data.

As with any form of observation, regularity, precision, and the number of data points generated are the key to meaningful results, and so this activity also involves a certain amount of self-discipline before there can be any analysis. The more consistent the manner of the observation and recording, the more useful the data will be.

STEM 8. Build a precise scale model of something. Try making an exact model of your room, for example, complete with furniture and belongings, at an exact scale of one inch to one foot (1”:1’). And remember, a scale model can be larger than the original object.
When one considers that a full-scale battleship AND an exact one-foot model of the same vessel can be built from the same set of instructions, the power of the concept of scale becomes apparent.

The art of scale model design begins with the concepts of precise measurement and proportion. A model of an existing object for which plans are not available begins with measurement, and all models require an understanding of the mathematical concept that ALL relationships must be set in the same proportion.

Materials for a scale model project are not particularly important, although resources like stiff cardboard, foam-core board, and balsa wood can be exceptionally useful. For the ambitious, many art and craft supply stores sell materials for scale modeling, and some even sell architectural details—roof shingles, door hardware, and the like—set to particular scales. A proper job also includes tools for cutting to precise measurements, and some kind of adhesive for fastening; with sharp cutting tools and aromatic glues, caution should be observed.

In an earlier idea we suggested the creation, as an art project, of a giant-scale model of a smaller object; such projects can have a certain whimsical charm. We referred there to a giant pencil as well as a giant lipstick, but any small object can be scaled up for the purpose of enjoying this activity.

(ALSO: The Arts and Creative Expression)

STEM 9. Bake a loaf (or two) of bread. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it’s a great exercise in food chemistry, cookery, and patience.
They say it’s the “staff of life,” and bread or bread-like foods are part of nearly every culinary tradition on the planet. Basically some sort of ground grain, usually but not always with a leavening agent like yeast or baking powder, breads are excellent sources of carbohydrates—regarded by most as a dietary necessary, in reasonable quantities—and their varied textures are an epicure’s delight—and they just tend to taste pretty good.

Bread recipes and video instruction on parts of the job like kneading are all over the internet, and breads can be as exotic or as ho-hum as the baker wishes. The many cultural traditions represented in the bread family—from Middle Eastern pitas to South Asian naans to Native American fry-breads to the multifarious baguettes, limpas, pumpernickels, and “white bread” of Europe and America—could represent a cook’s tour of the planet for an ambitious and curious baker.

We recommend tackling a yeast-raised wheat bread as a first go—the preparation of the ingredients, the proofing or activating of the yeast, the kneading, the waiting for rises, and the smell of the hot loaves as they come out of the oven and are set aside to cool before slicing are a great combination of work and pleasure and a fine exercise in deferred gratification.

For forty-some years we have been using the following basic bread recipe, the most flexible we know of. Based on white flour, yeast, sweetener (to feed the yeast), some kind of shortening, and a bit of salt, any sort of whole grain can be added, the sweetener is wide-open to experimentation, and the fat can be a low-flavor oil, butter, margarine, or (we suppose) animal fat or ghee. The process involves first mixing all the ingredients except the yeast and flour; then add the yeast to this mixture; then slowly adding the flour after the yeast has burst into bubbly, fragrant life—some young bakers are intrigued by the idea of yeasts being living organisms (and some, to be sure, are horrified).

FLEXIBLE BREAD RECIPE

Ingedients:

·  1 and 1/2 cups water

·  1 cup milk

·  1/3 cup natural sweetener (honey, cane sugar, corn syrup, agave…)

·  1/4 cup butter, oil, margarine, or other “fat”

·  1 cup whole grain (corn meal, oat meal, rye meal, mixed-grain hot cereal, wheat or oat bran…)

·  1 tablespoon salt

·  4 level teaspoons of active dry yeast (bread machine yeast will do)

·  6 cups, plus or minus, all-purpose flour

Directions:

1.  Mix fat, sweetener, salt, and grain in a bowl

2.  Bring water and milk to a boil and add immediately to the fat-sweetener-salt-grain mixture

3.  Mix thoroughly and let cool to approximately “skin” temperature—100° F. or 38° C.

4.  Add the yeast, then mix just enough to moisten yeast

5.  Let yeast work until there is a thick froth on the liquid mixture

6.  Add the flour, 2 cups at a time, mixing thoroughly. After about 4 cups the mixing becomes “kneading,” requiring strong manipulation with hands and arms to work the dough into a workable form. If it helps, the dough at the end will be just about the consistency of Play-Doh, with which most children are somewhat familiar.

7.  Form the dough into a compact ball, cover with a damp cloth, and let rise until doubled in size.

8.  Punch the dough down, re-form, cover with a damp cloth, and let rise until doubled again.

9.  Punch the dough down, form into two loaves, and then cover with a damp cloth and let rise for another half-hour or so, until the loaves are definitely bigger.

10.  Bake at 350° F. or 180° C. for 30–35 minutes. More, smaller loaves, rolls, or pizza crust will all require less time; the bottom should be golden brown and the top firm and lightly tanned. Loaves should sound a bit hollow when tapped on the bottom when done.

We suspect you could use gluten-free flour to make this bread, and the recipe’s flexibility also invites experiments with form: we’ve made pizza dough and dinner rolls from the same recipe as well as long baguette-shaped loaves and our usual loaf-pan loaves.

If kneading sounds like a challenge, there are YouTube videos to instruct.

As always, interested young bakers should be supervised as they work around hot liquids and hot ovens.

Once one recipe has been tried successfully, it’s time to explore the world’s recipe books for new adventures in bread!

(ALSO: Service and Helping Others; The Arts and Creative Expression)

STEM 10. It’s part art, part engineering: make something really complicated or really large out of a child’s building toy set like Legos, Construx, TinkerToys, or K’nex. Find a younger sibling or a pre-school teacher who can help you amass a truly awesome pile of raw material; choose your objective, make a design, and build away!

Go play with children’s toys!

If this seems like the simplest of all possible suggestions, think again. The lessons of pure design, structural visualization, logical planning and execution, measurement, and improvisation are essential tools for solving a great many of life’s problems, big and little. Here is a chance to be a design thinker, a maker, a true practitioner of STEAM: science, technology, engineering design, art, and mathematics.

In fact, being a professional display builder for Lego is said to be a lucrative career, and at one point the “audition” involved the deceptively simple task of building a sphere out of the random pieces the company supplied. Lego was looking for creative, adaptable brains who could imagine and then build whole new product lines and who could make the toys themselves into hitherto unimaginable constructions. All of the commercial building toys—or even a pile of homemade blocks made of scrap lumber, for that matter—have the potential to transcend their status as elementary toys to become the elemental stuff of wonderful new visions, made real.

Neighbors and relatives are great sources for these toys. After a safe pick-up, they will need a quick bath in soapy water before use, but they last nearly forever, and losses to breakage or misplacement simply add to the challenge of conceptualizing and completing ambitious designs.

Alternatively, the exercise could be to start small: discover the fewest number of pieces that can make a recognizable version of a specific object, for example. Or create hordes of tiny objects or figures, arrayed in patterns.

The possibilities here are truly endless.

(ALSO: The Arts and Creative Expression)

STEM 11. Find the website for (and maybe ask a science teacher at your school for a recommendation) and read from cover to cover a magazine about science or some branch of science. Scientific American would be a natural choice, but there are magazines about astronomy, environmental science, and technology that are pretty easy to find.
In the world of science—any science—periodicals serve a paramount purpose as the vehicle through which the results of virtually all scholarly research are made public. Even Scientific American, which has been published for more than a century as the most prominent magazine for laymen as well as scientists, occasionally presents new findings, and it remains important as a monthly summary of the most significant issues and compelling ideas in the field.

But along with Scientific American there are a host of magazines, some highly technical and others written for non-scientists, whose aims are to introduce their readership to the excitement and challenge of science in the twenty-first century. Science and Nature are probably the most prestigious general publications for scientists and medical researchers, while popular magazines like Science News and BBC Focus cover many issues.

Specific sciences also have their own magazines. Astronomy and Sky & Telescope are leading astronomy magazines, but there are other very readable periodicals in fields from archaeology to zoology. There are also many, many magazines with a technical focus, some general and others relating specifically to a single aspect of computer science, say, or alternative energy.

The youngster who can spend some time leafing through one of these magazines is likely to find a few articles of interest, a few things that are intellectually challenging, and very likely an entertaining but partially baffling array of advertisements and non-editorial content that serve, if nothing else, to provide a sense of the complexity and richness of the world of science.

(ALSO: Language, Literature, and History)

STEM 12. Master a pre-electronic form of mathematical calculation: learn how to use an abacus, a slide rule, a quipu, a Curta calculator, or some other calculating device or method. Instructions can be found on the internet, and slide rules can be sometimes be found  on internet auction sites or by inquiring of oldert scientists, engineers, or mathematicians one might know. There is even chisanbop, a really efficient form of calculating using just the fingers that can be learned on the internet; it is Korean in origin, and experienced practitioners can perform chisanbop calculations almost as fast as an electronic calculator.
It is hard to believe that just two generations ago most of the electronic technology that we now use to perform mathematical calculations was unavailable to the general public. Even electric adding machines used power only to assist mechanical processes, and only the most expensive and cumbersome machines were capable of simple multiplication.

Even so, human genius in many cultures had observed certain characteristics of numbers and created hand-operated devices that could perform sophisticated and precise operations. The east Asian abacus, for example, can add, subtract, multiply, and divide in skilled hands almost as quickly as an electronic calculator; although its capacities are limited, it is still sufficient for most commercial needs. The slide rule, based on logarithmic principles, enables rapid calculation in a number of modes, depending on the design of the rule (not, incidentally, a ruler, since a slide rule is not made for measurement); during World War II virtually every complex machine short of the atomic bomb was essentially developed by engineers using only slide rules.

The Curta calculator, a rarity these days and rather expensive when one can be found, is a masterpiece of precision design and manufacture from Liechtenstein that can do virtually anything a slide rule can. But the Curta is entirely digital, taking input and yielding data in precise numbers. We are partial to the Curta if for no other reason than that its mechanical elegance is almost unsurpassed. If the youngster has access to one of these, simply handling it will be a satisfying experience.

Chisanbop (also chisenbop) made its appearance in the U.S. just as cheap electronic calculators were entering classrooms, and so a promising and powerful way of teaching students to perform calculations literally by hand never quite had its day in school. Like the mechanical calculators, chisanbop provides its own education in aspects of number theory.

If the youngster is intrigued by this kind of technology, there are still other, less known systems that have been used for numerical recording and calculating, and there are also groups of enthusiasts who are determined to keep alive the skill of using them. While teachers may decry the apparent de-emphasis of “math facts” in contemporary education, the simple fact is the humans have been engaged in developing ways to make calculating “automatic” and easier for hundreds of years.

(ALSO: The World and Its Cultures; Language, Literature, and History)

STEM 13. Become really good at a strategy- or mathematics-based card or board game. Study some books on chess, and practice until you are ready to enter a local tournament. Work to develop serious skill at other games, like cribbage, bridge, go, or even checkers. Try becoming a bridge master.
The COVID-19 stay-at-home time mighht be game-playing time in many families or even (virtually) among groups of friends. Some people enjoy playing games above all things, and many people are blessed with a basic “game sense” that grants them a certain degree of success. But skill in serious strategy games, as opposed to those that are based on luck, can be developed, and many popular board and card games can be played by expert players at a very high intellectual level.

Few games have attracted more thoughtful attention than chess, contract bridge, and the Japanese strategy game, go. Any library’s games section will have numerous books on chess strategy and on bridge, and a larger library is likely to have books on go; the internet is another obvious source of instruction. Mastery of certain basic skills and strategies in all these games can rapidly improve a player’s level of success, and all these games have organizations devoted to raising the level of play as well as to allowing young players of equal skill to test their abilities against one another in tournaments and other ranking events. If the youngster is interested in any of these games, there is literally no limit to what they can achieve.

Even humbler and simpler games, like checkers, Monopoly, and other card games, have established strategies by which the most successful players play, and the internet has provided a forum for serious players that is also a great resource for novices who might wish to become serious themselves. There are tournaments held in all these games, too.

More esoteric games—strategy games like Dungeons and Dragons, Scrabble, backgammon, and other patent card and board games like Uno and Five Crowns—all have their serious players, and once again the internet has enabled communities to form. There are even junior tournaments in Scrabble, and some schools even have competitive Scrabble teams that are every bit as disciplined and intense as school chess teams.

Even if the youngster only wants to become good enough to beat a grandparent at rummy now and then, the art of seeing any game as an assemblage of strategies, contingencies, and problems to be solved is powerful intellectual exercise. Along the way the child may also develop his or her number sense, spatial visualization skills, memory, powers of observation, and ability to visualize far ahead of play.

(ALSO: The World and Its Cultures; Language, Literature, and History)

STEM 14: Become an expert on something: ball bearings, the moons of Jupiter, the manufacture of lip gloss, the art of Renoir, the Crimean War. Learn as much as you can about the science or engineering or art or history behind your topic; offer to give a presentation on your subject to your class at school or to some other group.
At some point many children become at least temporarily obsessed with something, and parents or guardians can nurtures the idea of obsession and expertise. Even so, many other children have a difficult time latching onto something that is truly of great interest, and so it is the combined job of the family and the child to try to identify something that has the potential to become, if not an obsession, at least the center of a strong, deep interest.

Sometimes the subject can be elicited through a kind of Socratic dialogue with the child, trying to draw them out on some apparent interest, past of present. The interest might be related to sport, to family, to nature, to the arts, to a pet or a hobby—it does not matter. What does matter is that child begins to see value in amassing more than a superficial knowledge or skill and to reach the point where one piece of information invites the discovery of yet another, and so on, until the youngster’s knowledge may exceed that of those around and even become a source of pride.

Many school projects are designed around the idea that the student should find an interest and develop it, and the best of such projects succeed admirably in inspiring children. Sometimes the student may carry the interest forward with them, building upon it until true expertise is obtained.

There is of course a danger that a narrow and passionate interest will somehow run counter to the exigencies of school learning, or that the individual will indeed run the danger of boring friends and family with recitations of facts and figures. With regard to the former, a well-developed interest is regarded as the sign of a capable and disciplined mind, while it may be up to those friends and family members to help give the young expert some perspective on where and when a demonstration of mastery might or might not be appropriate. But the child who possesses the curiosity and the discipline to develop a strong interest has acquired intellectual character of a fundamental and important sort.

(ALSO: The World and Its Cultures; Language, Literature, and History; The Arts and Creative Expression)

STEM 15. Study for your amateur radio operator’s license

A century ago amateur radio operators, who built and operated their own radio transmitters and receivers to explore the possibilities of what was then a new medium, were often regarded as the tech gurus of their time, revered in their communities the way we today admire expert coders and software developers.

Today there are still thousands of licensed radio amateurs, or “hams,” whose transmissions fill the airwaves on their allocated bands and who continue to tinker and improve the quality and capacities of their equipment. The licensing process is built on steps, but there is no lower age limit on licensure, which requires only that the operator pass a test based on a defined set of questions for which practice materials are readily available. Tests are offered through local radio clubs and given regularly.

In the United States the Amateur Radio Relay League partners with the Federal Communication Commission as a kind of clearinghouse for licensure and other information related to the amateur radio operations. Its website at www.arrl.org offers all the information the interested child would need to become a licensed operator.

Equipment, incidentally, has become much less expensive and esoteric in the Digital Age, so that a Technician Class amateur (the lowest license level) can find handheld transceivers for about  the cost of a very basic smartphone. Chores, odd jobs, or babysitting might offset this cost fairly quickly.

It should also be noted that there are a number of schools in the United States that have radio clubs that own equipment and can guide students toward becoming “hams,” often an entry point into sustained interests in engineering and technology. 

And the other side of the radio coin is that it offers students an entry point to quite literally a world of new acquaintances. As skills, license levels, and equipment sophistication rise, so do opportunities for conversations with other radio amateurs across the globe.

(ALSO: The World and Its Cultures)