Daniel Bibawy
10/01/13
The chapter starts off by giving reasons as to why learning takes place in informal science. The first is juxtaposition, which I understood as realizing that something is not the way you thought it was. I think this is a great tool to use when learning something, as it is an eye-opening and memorable experience and will help you remember this experience in the future. Multiple modes is giving a learner several methods to learn something and allowing the person to understand it in multiple ways. Interactivity is what the chapter focused on the most. Interactivity is the process of an informal science learner having a personal experience or interaction with the exhibit shown in front of him or her and making this experience more memorable through the personal interaction the learner has with it. There was an interactive exhibit of a skeleton during which children were allowed to play and fiddle around with it and after the exhibit, an astonishing 96% of the children were able to accurately draw a skeleton, even after some time after seeing the exhibit. Such numbers are difficult to argue with.
There was an activity named “Cell Lab” during which participants were able to conduct a variety of experiments in a wet-lab which were guided by the museum that housed these labs. One thing I thought was especially interactive about this activity was that the participants would put on the attire of a scientist (goggles, lab coat, gloves) which served to purposes: it assured the safety of the participants and really made them feel that they were scientists doing chemical experiments. This experiment brought out all 6 strands of science learning discussed in chapter two. It sparked the interest of the science learner, discussed in strand 1. They learn more and further their knowledge of the science topic as strand 2 talks about. They use the scientific method of asking questions, developing hypotheses and discovering answers to their questions discussed in strands 3 and 4. They use the technology of science and identify themselves as scientists, discussed in strands 5 and 6.
An exhibit called “The Mind” shows a plethora of ways in which a thought or mental dilemma can have physical manifestations. For example in one of the exhibits, participants choose, or choose not, to drink out of a toilet shaped fountain that has clean water and tell how they found the taste of the water.
This chapter really opened my eyes to the effect science can have on its learners. For the group of teens discussed in the last portion of the chapter, their lives were changed from having failing grades in high school to becoming college graduates because of the science experiment they had conducted for two years and saw come to fruition. I never thought of science as life changing in this regard. I suppose that when you put so much time and effort into a project and see it work out, it is a rewarding experience and helps mold a teenager, or even an adults, self-image and self-approval.
