We've been arguing that "thinkering" is the way many creative people work. Thinkering, you may recall, is the conceptual thinking that goes along with tinkering - making things with your hands. That's what Einstein, Edison, Faraday and Maxwell did. Steven Chu understands this; Exxon-Mobil doesn't.
Steven Chu, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, is clearly a "thinkerer"
. Chu recounts in his Nobel autobiography that making things was what attracted him to science and then paved the way to his greatest insights:
"In the summer after kindergarten, a friend introduced me to the joys of building plastic model airplanes and warships. By the fourth grade, I graduated to an Erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size. The living room rug was frequently littered with hundreds of metal "girders" and tiny nuts and bolts surrounding half-finished structures. An
understanding mother allowed me to keep the projects going for days on end. As I grew older, my interests expanded to playing with chemistry: a friend and I experimented with homemade rockets, in part funded by money my
parents gave me for lunch at school. One summer, we turned our hobby into a business as we tested our neighbors' soil for acidity and missing nutrients.....For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a ‘precision' measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Ironically, twenty five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer." (Chu, 1991)
"Thinkering" followed by math and physics pays off again! Symbolic knowledge readily builds upon sensual and kinesthetic knowledge - only rarely and with great difficulty does it work the other way around.
So why do we have the whole thing backwards? Why are we so confused about the relationship of non-symbolic and symbolic forms of knowing? And backwards and confused we surely are, as a series of television commercials by Exxon-Mobil exemplify. The ads feature employees describing what enticed them to become scientists and engineers. Most of these people talk about loving to take things apart to see how they worked or needing to play with and make things when they were children. Then the overvoice kicks in, explaining how Exxon-Mobil is fostering new scientific and engineering talent by getting students into mathematics and science classes earlier! Why, oh why, are the Exxon-Mobile executives not listening to their own people? Why, oh why, do the curriculum planners ignore what makes successful scientists successful and replace it with dry-as-dust lesson plans based on words and numbers?
We think symbol-centered learning in early and even middle grades puts the emphasis on the wrong syl LAB le. We don't need ever more, ever earlier symbolic instruction, we need new and improved sensual and kinesthetic learning! We need curricula that take children on explorations of the world around them, be it the natural or man-made environment. What are things m
ade of? If natural, how do they function? If man-made, how do they work? What problems in everyday living do they/might they solve? With these questions in mind, children in the early grades can exercise powers of
discrimination and classification by collecting bugs, feathers, leaves, bottle caps, food labels,
sports cards, stamps. In the process they can learn to make some of their own equipment or to adapt classrooms tools to their own purposes. How about adapting materials intended for other purposes (closet hangers, bed sheets or kitchen muslin) to make butterfly nets or (cigar or pencil boxes, Styrofoam and straight pins) to mount butterflies? The point is to encourage students to re-conceive and re-construct the given things of this world for novel use, precisely because the adaptation and modification of things, ideas and processes is THE INVENTIVE METHOD.
Keeping in mind the same questions about how things work, children in the middle and upper grades can graduate to more complex activities, like making working models of airplanes, cars, rockets, telescopes, pin-hole cameras,
electromagnets and motors; like drawing up detailed plans for new inventions for solving new problems. Move over, da Vinci! Students discovering what they and others can build with their hands and minds intuitively construct personal knowledge. Literally incorporating how things work, these same students prepare themselves for verbal and mathematical explanations of why things work they way they do - and for continued invention.
By the way, the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation suggestions similar Inventive Ideas for Schools and Families: "Do you have an old alarm clock, telephone, radio, or calculator that no longer works? Here's a family project that's de-structive, con-structive, and in-structive. Take it apart! (Be sure it's not plugged in and that any batteries are removed before you begin.) This ‘de-engineering' can teach you a lot about how things are put together and how they work." Indeed. Just as you can only become a musician by practicing music, you can only become inventive by practicing inventing.
This is not to suggest that thinkering curricula will make of every child a world-class inventor. Creativity is more complicated than that. But what we do mean to say is that without these kinds of hands-on activities, whether in our schools or in our homes, students can't understand the highly abstract, symbolic descriptions that dominate science, math and technology teaching and textbooks. More direct experience with nature and with inventions, not more math and science, will provide us with the next crop of Einsteins, Edisons, Faradays, Maxwells, and Chus!
REFERENCES
Steven Chu: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/chu-aut...
IIT Institute of Design "Thinkering Spaces" Project websites: http://www.id.iit.edu/705/ and http://www.thinkeringspace.org
How to make a pin hole camera: http://www.srphotography.co.uk/srppin.html
Smithsonian Institution Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation programs on play and invention http://inventionatplay.org/matter_main.html
