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Jun 4, 2009 01:50 PM | 7
The World Science Festival kicks off next week in New York City kicks with five days of panel discussions, science-inspired dance performance, and even a street festival. But co-founder Brian Greene has also wanted to use the festival as a springboard to provide year-round educational opportunities for underprivileged kids.
“I went through the New York City school system,” says Greene, “and I was so fired up about science that I went to Columbia University as a seventh-grader and started knocking on doors.” Now, he wants to get today’s kids fired up as well.
The Festival’s most developed educational program is called Pioneers in Science, where 6 children will get to sit on stage and interview oceanographer Sylvia Earle and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. But preparations for the interview began long before the festival, when 30 children from two New York City public schools, the Manhattan Center for Math and Science and the Brooklyn International High School (which accepts students who are recent immigrants), learn what it’s like to be a scientist.
Half the children spent their time learning molecular biology at the Harlem DNA lab run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and half learned to scuba dive and find out what it’s like to be an underwater explorer with scientists at CUNY City Tech. “Science now comes alive,” says Greene, “It’s not just stuff in school in textbook.”
The other two educational efforts are still in their pilot stages, Greene says. This year, the festival partnered with Global Nomads, a network of over 2000 schools in the U.S. and abroad that runs video-conferences to get kids engaged in global issues. In the pilot program, kids from four schools watched the film Naturally Obsessed: The Making of a Scientist, and got a chance to talk to the filmmakers and the Columbia scientists involved. (We wrote about James Watson’s appearance at the film’s premiere in February, where he expressed his own views on training young scientists.)
And with the help of the Bezos Family Foundation, the festival started a program to bring kids from all five New York City boroughs to the festival with a teacher, get interested in a topic, and research it back in their classroom over the course of the year. This year they only have 5 students involved, but they plan to double that number every year, meaning that 10 kids will come next year. “It’s a geometric progression,” Greene says, “so it gets big pretty fast.”
Image of Brian Greene from last year's festival courtesy of Suzie Horgan
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7 Comments
Add CommentOh no, not more rational people!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat we need are more religious fundamentalists.
Hooray for Brian Greene! I've read his books - Elegant Universe and Fabric Of The Cosmos - and they have inspired and fascinated me no end. And I even got one of them autographed by him. Go science!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear hotblack,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have 10 years if issues of The WatchTower for sale.
If God his son and the holy spirit are willing you will offer enough money to me for these magazines to become yours.
Amen.
Over 100,000 students and they enthuse 5, some how that does not seem like enough,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcellent. Even if those kids don't actually pursue science as a vocation, they will have a more complete understanding of the value of rationality and an appreciation of the scientific method. Most importantly, they will be more inclined to wonder and to doubt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." -- Charles Darwin
I thinks kids are naturally interested in science on it's how things work level - it's the math involved when they study it further that turns them off. I agree with those who say the best way to maintain interest is through lots of real life examples, for instance, one of my calculus teachers tried to demonstrate rate of change thru a cooking experiment, and because of that to this day I am fascinated by the calculus.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have read some books of B. Green and in one of them: "The Fabric of the Cosmos" I got stack when I found a sentence about the speed of the change of time. I am familiar with the theory of relativity but only then I began to think about the meaning of that sentence. The speed of something is usually defined as the the change of that something in relation to time or the derivative of that thing with respect to time. So, according with ether definition, the speed of change of time is 1. Am I missing something?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for any answer!