World Science Fair: Pioneers in science

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What's the best way to teach science to children so they learn it for life? That was the underlying theme of the Pioneers in science event that launched the World Science Festival yesterday. Six students from New York City public schools were chosen to interview Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman and MIT robot designer Cynthia Breazeal in front of a kid-filled audience in midtown Manhattan.

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Lederman says the way science education is structured is confusing. He advocates starting out with physics (minus calculus) as the foundation, then going on to chemistry and biology. Here's the idea: Start small with the fundamentals physics teaches -- making sense of how chemicals work. That sets you up for chemistry, when you learn how complex molecules interact. Then that sets you up to understand how those work in the body, which is the basis for studying biology. It's a more logical structure for understanding how the different areas of science build upon each other.

For Lederman, how science constructs a structure of theories based on conclusions from individual experiments is key to its educational importance. He said we're like Columbus, discovering the world is beautiful beyond the borders we can see. Nature makes things work in marvelous ways that we can decipher if we make connections between how the world works at the tiny particle and huge cosmic levels. For him, kids are naturals at physics because they ask these 'why' questions that physics can answer. This natural curiosity enriches us because it helps us uncover the beauty all around us, deepening our understanding and appreciation of the world.

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MIT robotics designer Breazeal was interviewed by three separate students. She wants to make sociable robots that interact with us -- CP30s and R2D2s that aren't fictional.

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A little girl who had the last question momentarily stumped her. She asked: "Will there ever be robots smarter than us?" Brezeal paused for a while. Then she said the girl should work on that -- and report back to Breazeal when she'd found (or created) the answer.

USA Today